I think of myself as a very lazy writer, though other people see it differently.

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.

A philosopher is a lover and searcher of truth, beauty, meaning, and wisdom.

To love is as natural as the blue sky.

How do you trust a government whose people are proved to be untrustworthy?

To fight, we must have oil for our machine.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.

I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.

I love working with people who have had television experience because I think there's a real efficiency and methodology that comes from that background.

Soon I will be an old, white-haired lady, into whose lap someone places a baby, saying, "Smile, Grandma!" - I, who myself so recently was photographed on my grandmother's lap.

That he loved her was his life’s greatest grace—that she loved him was a burden and mystery beyond compare.