Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard? Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

If I have succeeded better than many who surround me, it has been chiefly - may I say almost solely - from universal assiduity.

There is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine.

That is why we fight - in hopes of a day when we no longer need to.

If you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech.

My longing to improve my looks via The Body Shop is being replaced by my longing to improve my looks via Photoshop.

Don't let the fear of the thorn keep you from the rose.

I don't think that it is necessary to rethink curricular goals. But it is certainly worth thinking about whether these goals can be reached in multiple ways.

The altruism of foresters can serve as a motto for humanity in general: "We reap what we have not sown. We sow what we do not reap."

to understand our love they'd have to turn the world upside down