David Markson quotes:

Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.

I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.

Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then, I was lonely.

Doubtless these are inconsequential perplexities. Still, inconsequential perplexities have now and again been known to become the fundamental mood of existence, one suspects.

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

How miraculous it was, noted Diogenes, that whenever one felt that sort of urge, one could readily masturbate. But conversely how disheartening that one could not simply rub one's stomach when hungry.

In fact one frequently seemed to gather all sorts of similar information about subjects one had less than profound interest in.

What do any of us ever truly know?

The morningâ??s recollection of the emptiness of the day before. Its anticipation of the emptiness of the day to come.

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

You will say that I am old and mad, was what Michaelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.