...I am much better now at ambiguities.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.

Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything

I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

I would like to explain that I consider prayer above all an act of gratitude for existence.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.