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

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.

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don't live the only life you have, you won't live some other life, you won't live any life at all.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody's life. Everything's happening for the first time, which means that sorrow, then, lasts forever. Later, you can see that there was something very beautiful in it. That's because you ain't got to go through it no more.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.