All pornography is to a degree sadistic - inevitably.

Is it really beyond our wits to devise some form of censorship which would trap only the crudely sadistic?

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.

Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things. ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.