Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It's more like a fifth wheel - necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it's better to be stupid ... Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.