“Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

“I live in an unethical society that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don’t enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt, decadent. I, from my side, can’t deny the immense richness of these pleasures, or my addiction to them.”

“My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.”

“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”

“I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.”

“That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.”