“Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.”

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.

The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

I blundered into writing.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Success means participating fully in the conscious evolution of humanity, contributing to the shift in time to avoid the chaos and disasters foreseen.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

The aim of yoga is to calm the chaos of conflicting impulses.

Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

Fighting is pure chaos, and to be a good fighter you simply have to be prepared mentally and physically to handle that chaos.

Catastrophe and creation are twins.