Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

May your rivers flow without end... down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs... where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.