1. “A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
2. “An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.”
3. “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being "somebody," to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.”
4. “Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
5. “If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.”
6. "It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values-- the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle."
7. “I think "taste" is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”
8. “I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”
9. “I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”
10. “Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaminig must not be out of proportion to his waking.”
11. “Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.”
12. “The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and...he does it without destroying something else.”
13. “The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul's very life.”
14. ”What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
15. "You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it."
