The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

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.

Genius is 10% talent and 90% hard work

Don't make your career be your life. let it be your passion. Let it bring you pleasure. But don't let it become your identity. You are so much more valuable than that.

Call me crotchety, but I didn’t like being bossed around, especially before I’d injected caffeine into my system. Violet Parker

There is no wine in the world as heady as applause

You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere.

A 'fact' merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

Most of my stuff before CSI was kind of the jerk boyfriend, so I thought this was one of those deals, where these two have a thing going on, so we had a scene where they make out.

The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.

The only accounting we had of the origins and the structure of nature was Biblical Genesis.

In opening and conquering a country great and wild and rich - a country indeed not yet fully known or conquered - we have still to learn more about ourselves and each other.