AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

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.

You have to believe. Otherwise, it will never happen.

...and the worse the memory, the stronger its stranglehold on the present.

If the Khalifah implements even one law outside of the divine law, then he will be removed. The courts will face him and he will face capital punishment and he will be removed.

The thing about the intuition is that there's always a calmness to it, if it says yes to us or even if it says no. It's always very calm and a feeling of wisdom comes with it.

My God, I have come with the seeds of questions. I planted them, and they never flowered.

I loved the way she said 'LA'; I love the way everybody says 'LA' on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done.

Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.

I don't think my work is so strange. It's just a matter of having the discipline to go the whole way with an idea, to stretch it as far as it can go.

If you're always looking at someone else, trying to imitate them, how can your natural gifts ever emerge?

It is the triumph of superior reason to live with folks who don't have any.