“I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.”

“[He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roa...”

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”

“The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.”

“Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the fi...”

“Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.”

“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.”