That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

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.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.

Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.

In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average.

As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.

Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder

I was born black and female.

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

I'm able to make decisions even in the face of adversity.

Anybody who has played sports and says they have never choked is lying to you.

He lives to build, not boast, a generous race; No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.