“When you make a bet, you’re saying something.”

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.

It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.

Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.

Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

Since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

In the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Divorce transforms habit into drama.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.

Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment.” Whatever. I looked up the definition for ‘nerd’ in the dictionary. Know what it said?” “I bet you’ll tell me.” ” ‘If you’re reading this, you are one.’ ” You’re a riot.

I bet, of course, but that’s misleading. One must encourage bloodstock breeding.

Never bet against a cat.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.

I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’

We may switch presidents, but we`re just going to switch legs and keep on marching.

Buy our album, were Nirvana, a garage band from Seattle. Well, it sure beats raising cattle.

Many like me who operate in black America can only get our balanced story told nationally on BET talk shows.