Mystification is simple. Clarity is the hardest thing of all. You trustthe mystifier more if you know his deliberately choosing not to be lucid.You would trust Picasso all the way because he could dra...
My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet I find it the hardest to begin.
Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an ex...
Knygos tvirtina: ji padarė tai todėl ir todėl. Gyvenimas tvirtina: ji padarė tai. Tik knygose viskas paaiškinama, o gyvenime ničniekas. Nesistebiu, kad kai kurie žmonės teikia pirmenybę knygoms. Knygo...
It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old,
It seems to me that when you are young, you think about sex most of the time, but you don’t reflect on it much
It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.
It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has...
It may be all right, you may have talked about it and agreed it was all right, but that’s not how sex works, is it? It’s where the unsayable is king; it’s where madness and surprise rule; it’s where t...
Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?
Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but...
I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (like the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference...
I met a girl while I was out there: Annie.She was American, travelling round like me.We hooked up, as she put it, and spent threemonths together. She wore plaid shirts, hadgrey-green eyes and a friend...
I love you. For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in a bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like...
I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact...
I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.
I found myself comparing my life against Adrian's. The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. He took...
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much d...