Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

I like to see life with its teeth out.

We all need daily encouragement.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

Soul, soul is nothing. Can you see it, smell it, touch it? No.

The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.

I always try to have a book on hand, traveling is an excellent way of providing perspective, and studying Art History has made going to art museums way more fun than you can imagine.

Anybody who is rude to anyone in the service industry is automatically out.

Peter Bogdanovich is a good friend.

Thanks are justly due for things got without purchase. [Lat., Gratia pro rebus merito debetur inemtis.]

I think the theatre is as essential to civilization as safe, pure water.

Don't point your finger to the heights your children should go. Start climbing and they will follow.