“We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.”

To our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need.

The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’

Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.

It is as if to say: if these are not valued – if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing – are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

People change, but there really are limits.

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access

You write to find out what you believe.

We are children for a very long time.

The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.

we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.

When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe

Transgression is a quest for solitude

Mostly I’m interviewed by white people, and identified with white society.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.

I believe that each writer must decide in which language he or she is most comfortable.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

Most people who are healthy, and I’m healthy, can’t even live my life.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.