Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.