“There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad...”

“Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.”

“Its not that we have to quit this life one day, but its how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter,the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands,the scent of rain, the...”

“Rest in Peace? Why that phrase? Thats the most ridiculous phrase Ive ever heard! You die, and they say Rest in Peace! Why would one need to rest when theyre dead?! I spent thousands of years of wor...”

“I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the exte...”

“Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homers 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great...”

“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cove...”

“What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.”

“Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed some...”

“It figured my family would get along better with Clark than they did me.”

“The existence of other people is essentially awkward.”