The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

All violence flows from the same source ... the need for power. Power is the only true morality ... the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

You treat violence as an aberration ... when in truth it is the norm. It is the very essence of the human condition.

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.