As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour

If you were a fully realized person-whatever the hell that would be-you wouldn't fool around writing books.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I'm antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum - not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can't always be serious about it.

One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no.

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life