“Art proper, in other words, emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain an autonomy from its creator and its perceiver when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breathe and have a life of its own”

“Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. It's so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.”

“When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must be viewed.”

“Doesn't every love express itself this way, with the seeds of both its flowering and its ruin in the very first words, the first breath, the first though?”

“For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.”

“The painter once believed in something, but now he paints only a hole without meaning, without anything- nothing but nothingness, the nothingness of our time.”

“My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.”