You are never alone or helpless. The force that guides the stars guides you too.
I can't pretend that I did one really awful thing - I took a bite out of the apple but now I'm never going to sin again.
Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream.
That split is inside all Americans. There are contradictions inside all of us about color and race. We've learned to cover them up and live with them and pretend that deep cleavage is not there. We all bear that illness.
As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.
Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble - we're very intense dreamers. That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is. There is no American or Frenchhistory. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.
A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips and teaches us to perceive reality differently.
The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
The poor, no less than the rich, stay tuned in to the Dream Machine in bad times as well as good. . . . By 1995, millions of the poor were left without housing, medical care; jobs, or educational opportunity; six million children-one of every four kids under 6 years of age in America-were officially poor. Mired in Third-World conditions of poverty while video-bombarded with First-World dreams, rarely has a population suffered a greater gap between socially cultivated appetites and socially available opportunities.
Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.
I am not a politician. . . I only suffer the consequences.