“It's the compass; not just the little head ruling the big head, though that's part of it. It's the natural instinct of following your heart, your eyes, to move from place to place, country to country, and do what you feel inside, to find out what you feel inside. How can you find yourself if you stay in your country of birth? It's important, vital, to stand aside and take a look from a different angle, to look with a fresh pair of eyes.”

“There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don't open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there's an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little fetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what's in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little fetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn't want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing.”

“A fire can be any shape it wants to be. It's free. So it can look like anything at all, depending on what's inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that's because it's showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself...”

“Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.”

“What it is you are looking for, isnt at the stars but in front of your eyes ... when you download the head... will find it.”

“He wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in a painting. You have to do it from inside yourself... You could do it if you wanted to fight for it. If you'd lived right with your eyes.”