“It’s easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.”

“My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”

“In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”

“I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.”

“En ningún caso, solía insistir, comprendían los magos necesariamente su arte, a pesar de que la experiencia lo había llevado a un par de conclusiones generales sobre el tema. Por ejemplo, que cada vez que aprendía algo nuevo sobre sus poderes, esos poderes disminuían, o en todo caso, quedaban alterados.”

“Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at all, as far as I know. I don't think. . . I know what I'm talking about.”

“Indeed, if I have yet to join the hosts of the suicides, it is because (fatigue apart) I find it no meaningfuller to drown myself than to go on swimming.”