“ I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues. ”
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
~ Don Delillo
It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.