To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.

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.

I am becoming in coming undone. I unbind. I rise like the morning: revolution.

I have a deep, abiding, infatuation for words, sentences, and stories.

True affluence is not needing anything.

You have to wait six months to purchase a fuel efficient automobile made from overseas.

Ray Lewis knifed through those offensive linemen like a sucker-punch switchblade slicing between the ribs of some inebriated trash-talking punk outside a sports bar.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

It is a curious thing, but I have been right in everything I have done and said in my life.

"Can't sleep with a dead man in my closet." "You killed someone?" asked Ben with interest.

We need to get serious about combating gang violence on Long Island, and the entire nation.