Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.