These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.