Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.