Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

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.

I don't like people around me sad. I like making people happy.

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.

I fundamentally believe that people have a genuine desire to be positively engaged in the world around them.

What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.

The people who ignite our imaginations in the next century will become the idea barons. Gray matter will be their real estate, and their net worth will be determined by what grows out of it.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

St. Paul's arose like some huge mountain above the enormous mass of smaller buildings.

There is no beast more cruel than man.

You'll note that politicians no longer spend money, they invest it. Don't worry about paying more to the [IRS]. You aren't being taxed; you're taking a plunge on a fly-by-night stock issue.

Dear Young People, do not be mediocre; the Christian life challenges us with great ideals!