“All art is a kind of confession.”

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

“Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted.”

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”

“This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

“The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art”

“People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not- so grotesquely- resemble human beings.”