But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

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.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.