It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.