Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don’t have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you’re getting old. That means they got you, after all.
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
Passion paralyzes good taste.
I have always been full of lust – as I am now – but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.
The really important thing is not to reject anything.
What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -.
Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to!
She felt herself needing more and more sleep. When she awoke in the morning, she thought of when she might lie down again – and when she would sleep. She started going to the movies.
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
Most of my reading is rereading.
Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don’t live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
My ignorance is not charming.
The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.
Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.
A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.