What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

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

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.

The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.

As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.