A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for whatthey become.

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?