Life is a long failure of understanding ... a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough.

I don't want to know movie directors. I don't want to be close to them. I don't want to interfere with their work. I don't want them to interfere with mine.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.

January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: [...]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.