The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Traveling is all very well if you can get home at night. I would be willing to go around the world if I could be back in time to light the candles and set the table for dinner.” ♥ Gladys Taber.

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.

People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it.

When women thrive, economies thrive.

Sleep is pain's easiest salve

Free and fair access to books - to reading - is a right and one we should fight for.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

I think that there's a lot of guys out there that want to read the equivalent of chick lit, but really there's not being much written for them.