War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

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.

His knowledge was deep, but his pride has grown with it.

Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.

Zookeeper foible #1: Tendency to not equate fur and scale with fracture and scar.

Admirations are never paid in any way, try to make yourself of what you admire, and it will pay you with originality.

Really young kids are into guitars.

I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.

Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.

A man I knew who lived upon a smile, And well it fed him; he look'd plump and fair, While rankest venom foam'd through every vein.

My parents had a factory, so I was linked to the textile and fashion industry.

And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile.