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.

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.

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

It's almost as if this is the fundamental procedure in modern society: duplication and recycling.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.