“How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?”

“You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.”

“I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.”

“Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.”

“Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?”

“Have I ever said that Turner once actually had himself lashed to the mast of a ship, to be able to later do a painting of a storm? Which has never failed to remind me of the scene in which Odysseus does the identical thing, of course, so that he can listen to the Sirens singing but will stay put.”

“Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?”