No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.

There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other – even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation – must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic.

Journalist: ‘Can you describe the genesis and working-out of a poem based on an image that most people would simply pass by?’

Philip Larkin: ‘… I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.’