Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.