It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

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.

Life has a vendetta against writers. It does everything in it's power to get in the way of our craft. Maybe it thinks we embellish too much?

The important thing for any writer to remember is to take the writing seriously, but not the writer.

Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important 'cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.

We are here to heal, not harm. We are here to love, not hate. We are here to create, not destroy.

I hope to go into a poem sober and come out a little drunk. And if I do then that's a real poem.

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.

You, the strong, have I loved, though the marks of your iron hoofs are yet upon my flesh.

When we neglect the artist in ourselves, there is a kind of mourning that goes on under the surface of our busy lives.

Whence has come thy lasting power.