Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

A story? No. No stories, never again.

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must remain hidden, only showing it, in the end, by dissimulation.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Life is a bonfire where everyone else has brought marshmallows, and you—a stick.

Americans in any century can be too inclined to accept consultant-crafted images of flesh-and-blood people.

Great is bookishness and the charm of books.

Many get the repute of being witty but thereby lose the credit of being sensible. Jest has its little hour, seriousness should have all the rest.

He who multiplies riches multiplies cares.

L.A. is fun, but it feels like one of those towns in the north of Scotland where there's an oil rig just off the coast and whether or not you work for the oil rig, everyone is connected to it.

Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.

Faith comes in different tempers: there's the hard, brittle faith that shatters when it meets an obstacle it can't cut through, and the tough, springy faith that bounces off unchipped.

If you don't like my songs, don't hear it. If you don't like my music videos, don't watch it. If you hate me, I don't care.

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.