The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

Focus is where you fail or succeed.

Whosoever possesses a camera should never know boredom.

Reverse petting zoo. You pet the animals, and they pet you back.

When I put out the records, when I make a distribution deal, those distributors tell me who they sell it to and how many copies. So I want nothing less.

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire.

I couldn't survive my own pessimism if I didn't have some kind of sunny little dream.

In middle age, I practiced feeling old, but the real thing has been a rude surprise.

To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world.

If self is a location, so is love.

I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.