“I discovered myself through opposition and flung myself into pride and sadism, otherwise known as generosity. This last, like greed or racialism, is merely a balm secreted as a cure for our inner wounds which, in the end, poisons us: to escape the desolation of created things, I prepared for myself the middle-class solitude for [...]
“A lot of people think having a big fantasy life is dangerous. Maybe that is why someone’s always trying to take it away from you. I think that’s why people become painters, musicians and even photographers.”
“In other words, a quiet, self-confident, and trustful existence of your own – this is the truth of Zen.”
“an intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”
“People read mysteries, romances, and thrillers to anesthetize themselves, not to alert their souls. Most books are enslaving rather than liberating. They lull the senses; they hypnotize the moral imagination.”
“Maybe that was why poets and artists were needed by the human race: because everyone felt like an alien, but poets were the ones who knew how to express it in words.”
“The writer is a vessel for the muse, and when nothing fills the vessel, the vessel wonders whether it exists at all.”