“I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.”

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Winter solitude- in a world of one colour the sound of the wind.

The solitude is taking me home.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

True happiness is impossible without solitude.

Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

I am thinking of you in my sleepless solitude tonight.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.