Writing is a mysterious activity.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.