The Sea Where Living Creatures

My Confidence In The Future Of Literature Consists In The Knowledge That There Are Things That Only Literature Can Give Us, By Means Specific To It.

Arriving At Each New City, The Traveler Finds Again A Past Of His That He Did Not Know He Had: The Foreignness Of What You No Longer Are Or No Longer Possess Lies In Wait For You In Foreign, Unpossessed Places.

I Could Distinguish The Shape Of Her Bosom, Her Arms, Her Thighs, Just As I Remember Them Now, Just As Now, When The Moon Has Become That Flat, Remote Circle, I Still Look For Her As Soon As The First Sliver Appears In The Sky, And The More It Waxes, The More Clearly I Imagine I Can See Her, Her Or Something Of Her, But Only Her, In A Hundred, A Thousand Different Vistas, She Who Makes The Moon The Moon And, Whenever She Is Full, Sets The Dogs To Howling All Night Long, And Me With Them.

My Working Method Has More Often Than Not Involved The Subtraction Of Weight. I Have Tried To Remove Weight, Sometimes From People, Sometimes From Heavenly Bodies, Sometimes From Cities; Above All I Have Tried To Remove Weight From The Structure Of Stories And From Language. . . . Maybe I Was Only Then Becoming Aware Of The Weight, The Inertia, The Opacity Of The World--qualities That Stick To The Writing From The Start, Unless One Finds Some Way Of Evading Them.

The Universe Is The Mirror In Which We Can Contemplate Only What We Have Learned To Know In Ourselves