This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished.