We sometimes have a flash of understanding that amounts to the insight of genius, and yet it slowly withers, even in our hands - like a flower. The form remains, but the colours and the fragrance are gone.

It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

Progress would be wonderful - if only it would stop.

Layer by layer art strips life bare.