If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?