I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

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

It is not the position, but the disposition.

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.