Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

If people notice you only when you do something very strange, then you are very lucky! You can enjoy your life without being noticed as long as you don’t do anything very strange!

We were born in charge of our own being, our own personality. Other people's personalities are beyond our control.

I somehow make it through the first month. I dress and brush my teeth when they tell me to. And I experience the hollow feeling of complete loss, which is emptiness.

Joseph moved to prove his sincerity in his vision-they moved ahead to invalidate his sincerity and what they think is his imaginative illusion.

Just because I haven't yet had any project surgery, I'm not going to knock it, because I think women have the right to do whatever they want to their bodies that make them feel good about themselves.

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

It doesn't feel good when you have to struggle to get your pants on.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

The sunset glow of self-possession.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.