Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.

In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the blacks down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. when the drugs don’t work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don’t make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like ‘You keep stiller when every time you move something jangles’.

She was dizzy with her own feelings, her own voice. She was flying around on a carnival machine that would not stop, she could not make it stop and she screamed and screamed.

I’ve known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn’t let them know you know.

It isn’t success after all, is it, if it isn’t an expression of your deepest energies?

It’s strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman’s appearance to her face.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one’s genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

Even disasters – there are always disasters when you travel – can be turned into adventures.

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.