“Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum -- a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.”

“You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.”

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

“forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums”

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”

“The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.”