The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

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.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

Imitation is the sincerest (form) of flattery.

The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB

What in the world would I sing for if I had it all?

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

The public is always good.

If you really believe in yourself and your music that much, you're gonna do your thing, regardless what people say.

Twenty-four is a prudent age for women to marry at.

I felt fine after 24 hours and asked the state commission to prolong my stay in space to three days. And I carried out the entire schedule. Could I have done that if I had been half-dead?