..which should teach you something about this world. That it's a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn't a thing you can do about it.

I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

Superman is, after all, an alien life form. He is simply the acceptable face of invading realities.

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him. "Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her. "It takes a man with real heart" —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— "to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

Never believe your eyes

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.