Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

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.

I write, like anybody else, about how it is to be human." -- Mark Merlis

Hope greets your desires warmly while doubts insult your efforts bitterly!

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

By thinking and acting affirmatively in this minute, you will influence the hour, the day, and in time, your entire life.

The financial costs of family breakdown are incredibly high.

I am the laughter of the new-born child On whose soft-breathing sleep an angel smiled.

Where there is no purity, there is no Unity. Without Unity you cannot attain Divinity. Then your life is just a waste. First purity, next Unity, then you realize your Divinity.

I'm not trying to be the new anybody.

Set high standards for yourself and don't settle for anything less. You are the best judge of yourself and your capabilities.

The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.