Addicts turn their pleasures into vengeful Gods.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

It is not very important where you are, but where your thoughts are taking you is important.

It's our greed to extract more and more from good that turns it into evil.

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

It may not be written in any book, but it is written - You can't go back, you can't repeat the unrepeatable.

What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.

[on Hollywood] It looks, it feels, as though it had been invented by a Sixth Avenue peepshow man.

Doesn't every encounter with God only cause us to thirst for Him more?

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

Stay out of the gentlemen's clubs. Get a lot of rest. Just have fun and relax and stay focused.

I'm not running for canonisation.