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

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.