All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing.

I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine . . . "Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved; do not presume: one of the thieves was damned." That sentence had a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench