As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

It's almost scary how good things are right now. I've been engaged now for about a year and it's the first time anything like that has happened to me.

I'm known as being a massive dweeb who's into video games and so on.

So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning.

We who advocate peace are becoming an irrelevance when we speak peace. The government speaks rubber bullets, live bullets, tear gas, police dogs, detention, and death.

There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasnt heard it.

Why do we take a dollar? Why do we give a dollar to countries that have no rights for women? We have to think about that.

Lord please save his soul, he was the king of rock and roll.

I don't like to call myself a feminist writer. I say I'm a feminist, but I don't write to propagate an ism.