I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order