A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Sanity is a cozy lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.

To be a convincing story, you've got to know what you're talking about. In EVERY detail."-Rayner Unwin

The field was wet, the lane was wet, and the spirits of my mechanic and helper were damp.

I, in the end, make art for myself.

A jester unemployed is nobodys fool.

I did a movie called Marathon Man and it was one of my best memories.

Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one is smaller.

God did not die. The God who took on Himself a human nature died in His humanity, but the deity did not perish on the cross.

Statistics are for losers.

The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues.