“A great work of art is one that continues to repay attention.”
“A great friendship was like a great work of art, he thought. It took time and attention, and a spark of something that was impossible to describe. It was a happy, lucky accident, finding some kindred part of yourself in a total stranger.”
“The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.”
“Every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”
“Beautiful, sad, wounded, and lost,” he continued. “A freak, a work of art, a liar, and a lover.”
“The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.”