When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.

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.

Hundreds of wise men cannot make the world a heaven, but one idiot is enough to turn it into a hell.

Keep on questioning. Keep on searching.

Someone who normally moved so slowly, this time, for once, was long gone.

The way to be safe is never to be secure.

I wanted so badly to be straight like my friends. But I couldn't change it any more than I could change having brown eyes. And I knew I would never fit into what kids thought was normal.

I just spent my whole life training and focused on one thing, I really don't even think about after the fact! It's like, oh yeah, I have to do something after!

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books.

[A]s previous studies have concluded, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are probably thickening rather than melting.

British education is probably the best in the world, if you can survive it. If you can't there is nothing left for you but the diplomatic corps.