Never Underestimate The Power Of The State

I Am Very Unmusical. I Can't Carry A Tune. I Would Never Be Able To Play An Instrument.

Sitting For A Picture Is Morbid Business. A Portrait Doesn't Begin To Mean Anything Until The Subject Is Dead. This Is The Whole Point. We're Doing This To Create A Kind Of Sentimental Past For People In Decades To Come. It's Their Past, Their History We're Inventing Here. And It's Not How I Look Now That Matters. It's How I'll Look In Twenty-five Years As Clothing And Faces Change, As Photographs Change. The Deeper I Pass Into Death, The More Powerful My Picture Becomes. Isn't This Why Picture-taking Is So Ceremonial? It's Like A Wake. And I'm The Actor Made Up For The Laying-out.

I Think More Than Writers, The Major Influences On Me Have Been European Movies, Jazz, And Abstract Expressionism.

There Came A Time In Every Prolonged Effort When He Had A Moment Of Near Panic, Or 'terror In A Lonely Place', The Original Semantic Content Of The Word. The Lonely Place Was His Own Mind.

In This Century The Writer Has Carried On A Conversation With Madness. We Might Almost Say Of The Twentieth-century Writer That He Aspires To Madness. Some Have Made It, Of Course, And They Hold Special Places In Our Regard. To A Writer, Madness Is A Final Distillation Of Self, A Final Editing Down. It's The Drowning Out Of False Voices.