The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

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.

No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.

You can cover the wrinkles of age by becoming more cheerful and enthusiastic.

Pride kept her from confiding in the other girls, and caution kept her from confessing to the older women.

John Travolta said he sometimes lets his friends take control of his airplane even though they don't know what they're doing. Then Travolta said he often does the same thing with his career.

You know, religion itself, Eastern and Western, is divisive and quarrelsome anyway.

Surrounded by noises from televisions, airplanes, subways and automobiles, most of us 'tune out' for self-protection.

Read good, big important things.

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience.

Music is nourishment, and a comforting elixir. Music multiplies the beauty of life and all its values.