A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating desire that language masters it.

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

I struggle to give life to a world but seem to engender only death.

Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.

I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.

When all else fails, philosophize.

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

It gets harder all the time ... Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.

Words come reluctantly to me, they clatter in my mouth and tumble out heavily like stones.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I do not think it was ever intended that people should live here. This is a land made for insects who eat sand and lay eggs in each other's corpses and have no voices with which to scream when they die.

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.

This monologue of the self is a maze of words out of which I shall not find a way until someone else gives me a lead. I roll my eyeballs, I pucker my lips, I stretch my ears, but the face in the mirror is my face and will go on being mine even if I hold it in the fire till it drips. No matter with what frenzy I live the business of death or wallow in blood and soapsuds, no matter what wolfhounds I hurl into the night, my acts, played out within the macabre theatre of myself, remain mere behaviour. I offend no one, for there is no one to offend but the servants and the dead.

When we dream that we are dreaming, the moment of awakening is at hand.

It is a world of words that creates a world of things.

Enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children.

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.