“Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.”

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Sometimes all you need is a little madness to speak your mind…

Great boldness is seldom without some absurdity.

Color my life with the paint of your madness.

If madness had not lost me I would not have found myself.

She is an all encompassing enigma of beauty and madness don’t attempt to tie her down.

Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

Another man’s success should never make you mad.