The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

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.

If rejection destroys your self-esteem, you're letting others hold you as an emotional hostage.

When I found out I could write I was shocked! I didn't know I could write.

I can't imagine anything more stressful than monogamy.

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.

Jesus Christ is too important to be left to the theologians.

The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages.

I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

There's always a lot happening. I mean, that's the thing about politics: it's just one damn thing after another!

I've always wanted to play Maria in West Side Story. My idol is Natalie Wood, and I love the movie, so I think a modern-day twist on it would be really neat.