The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.

Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

An active and creative reader is a re-reader.

Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.