Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

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've changed so much. Look at me! I'm eating scones on a bed with a pirate!

We live in a country that used to have a can-do attitude, and now we have a 'what-can-you-do-for-me?' attitude, and what I try to do is find ways that we can develop common ground.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

The quality of your play never counts as much as the quality of your effort.

There's a fine line between character building and soul destroying.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

Knock on wood is a saying for good luck. I think that started when someone went to someone's door to see if someone was home. "I hope Joe's home, knock on wood!"

For patience, sov'reign o'er transmuted ill.

Worry worships the words of the enemy