The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.