Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

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.

Never strike out of anger if at all possible, this will give your enemy the advantage and strengthen his resolve and psyche

At this moment, I am obscenely happy. Please don’t screw this up or dump me or cheat on me or divorce me.”“All right, ” he said.

Cities may now bulldoze private citizens' homes, farms and small businesses to make way for shopping malls or other developments.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

We have always been a nation different from the Chinese. Long ago we fought wars with them.

Time heals all and heels hurt to walk in, but they go with the clutch that you carry your lip gloss in.

Life is a hurdle and you'll never clear it. Death is the end of the ride and you fear it.

Not to be covetous, is money; not to be a purchaser, is a revenue.

I am certain in my heart that all that I am, I have received from God.

Science can explain the universe without the need for a Creator.