You write to find out what you believe.

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.

People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

Listen not to the words that have been spoken, but bend your ears to what has not been said.

She now saw that she wanted a boy to do more than follow her in blind devotion. She wanted a boy to challenge her, to tell her about things she'd never thought of, to show her new points of view.

This is what fun is like, " said Rain, almost to herself.

Prophets foretell the future

My weapon is just a movie.

The confidence with which a Sovereign is invested, is solid only when it is sanctioned by the suffrages of the people, who clothed him with the supreme magistracy.

I don't care at all about the mainstream; I don't care about popularity contests; I don't care about who's got the biggest-selling album; and I don't care about glossy production.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.