Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.

That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.