Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory changes as a person matures.

She reeked of respectability and sophistication, and he went hard on a helpless surge of lust.

I'm constantly embarrassed at the level of attention actors get and the level of money that we get. It's completely disproportionate.

In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.

Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

It is intelligence that brings order, not discipline.

The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.

I'm hyper-aware of my last name and it's lack of Derby or Horowtiz-esque sonorousness. Moffett sounds like a type of couch cushion. I guess I'm hoping to start a wave of first-name usage.

“I don't like the look of it at all,” said the King: “however, it may kiss my hand, if it likes.” “I'd rather not,” the Cat remarked.

I like the type of music that can make my heart beat and the melody that makes me high but this type of music isn't popular in Korea.