To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

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.

What we need is to use what we have.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

My ignorance is not charming.