People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

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.

If you want a sense of purpose for experiencing pressures, use your knowledge of Jesus Christ's comforting, enlivening, energizing presence to be a comfort to others.

We are not called upon to do all the good that is possible, but only that which we can do.

Edward Norton and I have known each other awhile. I just think he's the real deal, supremely talented and smart. He's got a great sense of humor.

I believe in the family. I believe in marriage, and I think it's such a great institution. I think men should be able to marry each other, and women should be able to marry each other.

Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

The music is in minors.

Try fighting with your head for a change... it's a good one, even if it does resist learning.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear, I rise. Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear, I rise.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?