In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

To tell you the truth. I am a wild and passionate novelist. I am therefore easily given over to telling wild and passionate lies.

I suppose that I am ambitious.

The past is just data. I only see the future.

No one blames her." "That never matters," said Alec. "Not when you blame yourself.

The sense of urgency has almost completely vanished.

Most of today's black convicts have come to understand that they are the most abused victims of an unrighteous order.

I can remember sitting in a cabin outside of Denver writing that with a can of soup on the stove.

He’s not like you, Tod. Aside from a couple of notable exceptions, you tend to think things through, but Nash is ruled by his heart—

Rich people choose to get paid based on results. Poor people choose to get paid based on time.

A cockle-fish may as soon crowd the ocean into its narrow shell, as vain man ever comprehend the decrees of God!