Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in anything other than movement.

The wonderful thing with some of the things I've done - most of them, really - is to be trusted. To be able to do your thing, to work on it, hone it into my gem of creativity!

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.