“That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.”

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.

There’s something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.

The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

A just city should favor justice and the just, hate tyranny and injustice, and give them both their just deserts.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

I grew up in a desert, which has no kind of imagination.

The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ?