“Birth was the death of him.”

We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.

Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

People are bloody ignorant apes.

Better hope deferred than none.

All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.

There’s never an end for the sea.

My mistakes are my life.

I’m convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.

A wonder lasts but nine days, and then the puppy’s eyes are open.

Virtue is the fount whence honour springs.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

Successful people aren’t born that way. They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don’t like to do. The successful people don’t always like these things themselves; they just get on and do them.

The body without soul is no longer at the sacrifice. At the day of death it come to rebirth. The divine spirit will make the soul rejoice seeing the eternity of the world.

Tear me open and I will bleed in your name. My heart aches from your absence, but in the aching and breaking is where my art is born.

You’ll never be able to silence the woman who was born to write.