The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.' 'I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.

The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

When she awoke there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. 'Perhaps I made it up,' she thought. Then it came to her - the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, 'There aren't any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.