The culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].

Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.

There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.

Self-realization and self-fulfilment are the sine qua non for human existence.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.