Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy. (about Guernica).

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I'd have been lying!

The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.

Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.