“Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.”

I was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind.

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.

But I see no reason why a woman should not grow and develop in all those outlets which are suited to her nature, it matters not at all what they may be.

I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.

For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.

There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.

Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now – yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

Gambling in the mark has been the great indoor sport of the capitalists for months, and consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant–one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.

Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.

The refinement of the consciousness and of the heart, are considered incidental (or subordinate) things.

I never considered myself a performance artist.

If we’re going to be considered horror filmmakers, we have to prove it not only to ourselves, but to the audience that we can actually make something scary.

And then you’ll consume them however you can. For example, I don’t really watch Showtime, but I bought ‘Homeland,’ and I’ve been watching every episode on my iPad.

Still, I considered it a tremendous injustice that Noll had not been more widely translated and was determined to rectify it.

I think where it’s going is toward what the music industry is like, where channels will be considered more like labels that carry the type of TV show that you like

Man may be considered as having a twofold origin – natural, which is common and the same to all – patronymic, which belongs to the various families of which the whole human race is composed.

I realized I had some cultural capital to spend, and I wanted to use it to introduce another author who might be considered a risk by conventional publishers. Michael Noll was at the top of my list.