The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

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.

Our laugh is a torment and our cry is a joy for the Satan!

Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique. No one can tell you how to use your time. It is yours. Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it.

A man can be right and president, but he can't be both at the same time.

Without equality, I say, there cannot be liberty.

God makes the life fertile by disappointments, as he makes the ground fertile by frosts.

I'm a Giants fan through and through. I am crazy about Eli Manning. I'm all about the Giants.

These are thy glorious works, Parent of good!

Haven't you lived in the South long enough to know that nothing is ever anybody's fault?

I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.

Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.