The nonconformist here may be "beat down" by life but still has a beauty in his or her longing for freedom and for an awakening of the mind.

Some of us are sixty feet long with a brain the size of a walnut.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

I don't go into hysterics or anything, but I look around for something to smash it with. I used to live out in the country when I first moved here, and there were a lot of centipedes in the house, and I set out to kill them all. A program of genocide. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and I'd know there's a centipede in this room. And there always was. And I couldn't go to sleep until I killed it.

If you talk you always end up with politics, it gets nowhere. I mean man it's strictly from the soft typewriter.

I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.