Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.

...never have I subscribed to the doctrine of willful rejection of the world or its visual image. To the non-objectivist this act of impiety may be shockingly impure, but God, I have no desire to be either hollow or sterile.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

I don't trust compliments. I've been getting them for years. Sometimes I deserve them, sometimes I didn't. But generally when people give you compliments there's one of two things wrong with them. Either they're false, or what's worse is they're sincere. They really mean the compliment. And then they're offering you their loyalty. And I'm kind of a stingy... Well, I don't necessarily want to give all that loyalty back. So either way, let's skip the compliments.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.