Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

The question of the social uses of photography opens out into the very largest issues of the self, of the relationship to community, to reality.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.