All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

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

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.