Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.

Art seeks ever to conceal the means by which its effects are produced and the method in which the work is wrought.

Painting, literature, music, are more closely allied than the public usually admit. They are merely different means of expression.

What can be hidden in a book?

Nothing contains a greater metaphysical mystery than the fact that a single thing presents two separate sides if you change the direction of your eyes, that a single phenomenon has a hidden "secret side." A long time ago, when I was a child, I would look at a framed painting hanging on the wall and become obsessed with the thought: What kind of world is secretly hidden behind that framed landscape? I often removed the oil painting to peer at its back. This question I had as a child remains for me, an adult today, as an unsolvable mystery.

Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way.

All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.

Just as art is the concealment of art, laissezfaire is the concealment of tremendous generosity.

Words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.