To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.