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.

This is every writer's nightmare - the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us.

... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.