What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

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

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

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

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.