People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

Summer had come to sit on New York's face.

But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill-take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edges of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.