A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.

This is the room where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter

You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.

Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats.

My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.