What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

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.

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.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

What we could consider magic, may just be science that we don’t understand yet.

I am a writer, I'm supposed to be intense and emotional,

The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are.

I would warn any minority student today against the temptations of self-segregation: take support and comfort from your own group as you can, but don’t hide within it.

Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.

The opening and the folding flowers, that laugh to the summer's day.

Contemplation is wisdom's best nurse.

Either we pay the government's bills, or we leave them for our kids to pay. It's that simple.

Men of quality are in the wrong to undervalue, as they often do, the practise of a fair and quick hand in writing; for it is no immaterial accomplishment.

Dress for the story that you’d like to have people know about you before you even open your mouth.