I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

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.

Excuses, we all have them, but successful choose not to use them

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Follow your dreams, because your dreams won't follow you.

I was really stuck in the whole Farah Fawcett hairdo long after it was past being in fashion.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Inner freedom demands the rejection of any imposition that injures our dignity.

He who does not believe according to the tradition of the Catholic Church is an unbeliever.

Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

A well-tailored suit is important - and I don't like wearing belts with mine - it should be tailored to your body.

Hard work is a muscle that you develop, as is taking risks.