MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

She needs you for more than just protection. It's how it works. You want the strong girl, you understand that she's with you because she wants to be. Not because she has to be. You know that, right?

Society does not create nor define my beauty. I do.

This book is a very enjoyable read - I read it in a weekend. Eveline Maedel

That's not a religion, that's Pokemon.

It takes a different kind of thinking to solve a problem than the kind of thinking which produced the problem.

No battle can be won in the study, and theory without practice is dead.

I couldn't imagine a better place [Australia] for making a film on the end of the world.

History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.

Yes, deficits are a problem. I've been saying so for more than a quarter of a century now. But the problem is not the size of the deficit, it's the size of government's claim on our economy.