If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

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.

Even the ugliest swan is still more beautiful than the loveliest crown on the fence, Anna thought

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

The soul's dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay With courage to behold the restless day, And count it fair.

The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.

Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

I would give worlds, could I believe One-half that is profess'd me; Affection! could I think it Thee, When Flattery has caress'd me.

While local matters are happening around you, let your mind sail to the ocean of universal matters.

People think drama drives story, but I think the comedy is really the heart and soul.