...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.