I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.

If I don't write, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.

People will begin to explore all the sidestreets of sexual experience, but they will do it intellectually. . . . Sex won't take place in the bed, necessarily--it'll take place in the head!

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.

The catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game. [. . .] Each one of these fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle the formal structure of time and space which the universe wraps around us at the moment we first achieve consciousness.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.