...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.

... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

Language is a spiritual mansion in which you live and nobody has the right to evict you.

Love is the most potent cosmetic.