When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.

The desert could not be claimed or owned — it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.

He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.