All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. 

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing - a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.

Once you had read the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.