I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I've done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don't complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words; he needed them. But these other people [modern philosophers] are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.

If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?