“The interviewer wishes to visit me. He wishes to see my pencil poised above the page, my painted lampshade, my bookshelves, my old white borzoi asleep at my feet. He feels he needs the background music of bogus informality, and as many colorful details as can be memorized, if not actually jotted down (‘N. gulped down his vodka and quipped with a grin—’). Have I the heart to cancel the coziness? I have.”

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“I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.”

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“My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published.”

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“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness.”

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“Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.”

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