Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.