I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

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.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

Guilt kept me going. It was impossible not to blame myself for what had happened, but even guilt was a comfort. It was a human feeling, a sign that I was still attached to the same world that other men lived in.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.