The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential – the imagination.
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
Music is only love looking for words.
Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can’t climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.
A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.
Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
Art – the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.
We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.
We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you’d do something else.
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
It is not peace we seek but meaning.