“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ”

“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

“How did the world ever manage without me before I was born?' he wondered. 'Didn't they feel something was missing?”

“Aidan to Jude: What's wrong with running away if where you were didn't suit you? Doesn't it follow you're funning to something else? Something that does suit you?”

“Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead....""Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desire, feared, possible or impossible," Ludmilla says. "Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be....”

“Does madness bring creativity? Or does creativity cause madness? Can an artist create without the ups so high and the downs so low?”