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

My library is an archive of longings.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

Mad people = People who stand alone and burn. I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

Instead of expecting all and being lowered into despair each time I get less, I expect nothing now and, occasionally, I get a little, and am more than a little happy.

Art is seduction, not rape.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Passion paralyzes good taste.

Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent.

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

My ignorance is not charming.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

The really important thing is not to reject anything.

Being in Love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

Etymologically, 'patient' means sufferer.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.