I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.