If One Wanted To Depict The Whole

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.

Whenever Humanity Seems Condemned To Heaviness, I Think I Should Fly Like Perseus Into A Different Space. I Don't Mean Escaping Into Dreams Or Into The Irrational. I Mean That I Have To Change My Approach, Look At The World From A Different Perspective, With A Different Logic And With Fresh Methods Of Cognition And Verification.

Very Often The Effort Men Put Into Activities That Seem Completely Useless Turns Out To Be Extremely Important In Ways No One Could Foresee. Play Has Always Been The Mainspring Of Culture.

New York Is Perhaps The Only Place In America Where You Feel At The Centre And Not At The Margins, In The Provinces, So For That Reason I Prefer Its Horror To This Privileged Beauty, Its Enslavement To The Freedoms Which Remain Local And Privileged And Very Particularized, And Which Do Not Represent A Genuine Antithesis.

Falsehood Is Never In Words; It Is In Things.