What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

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.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.