All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

The truth is always multiplex.

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

oh love, doesn’t the fact that the world is so big, laid out like ripe fruitmake you want to stay?

Power is a trick. It lies where we believe it lies.

I think every album you have, especially if it's done well, you feel like you're competing with yourself.

There is a beast in man that should be exercised, not exorcised.

The whole of my acting career is a bit of a mystery to me.

On Valentine's Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays-fear.

The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.

I remember that Charles Schulz, at the end of his life, had eyes full of tears for Charlie Brown. I thought about the reason for all his emotion: he had lived for 50 years with them.

We must face the appalling fact that we have been betrayed by both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Odd how it was so easy for a stranger to assume such familiarity. Especially when those who were supposed to know you best often didn't, not at all.