Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.