"It bothers a lot of people, but like you said, it's nobody's business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it."

"What is the answer?" [ I was silent ] "In that case, what is the question?"

"Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood."

"Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume."

"Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know."

"We are always the same age inside."

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

"I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer."

"All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra."

"The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting."

"It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business."

"Let me listen to me and not to them May I be very well and happy May I be whichever they can thrive Or just may they not. They do not think not only only But always with prefer And therefore I like what is mine For which not only willing but willingly Because which it matters. They find it one in union. In union there is strength."

"Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain. There. Make twenty-five be a woman. The meaning of that does not interest me. It is a complexion that interests that makes ridiculous because that does not make it something else. But it does make them which is again me. Make twenty-five be a woman. I do not lose it. The color is there. Do you see. Dependent entirely upon how one word follows another. Who knows how Howard likes hearing. I can do it so easily it always makes grammar but is it grammar. Forget grammar and think about potatoes. Grammar after all has to do with why they were presented."

"When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream."

"All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation... You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death."

"Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded."

"One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure."

"Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches."

"No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight."

"It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken."

"A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle."

"The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand."

"Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it."

"From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets."

"A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style."

"("Who are some of the women writers around who are not feminists, who are simply writers, or even doing a disservice to the feminist cause?") I think an example would be Joan Didion. First, I have to say I dislike the word cause. I think she does a disservice to the feminist cause, to any progressive cause, and also to the clarity of language. I've read a couple of her books. I don't know anything about her except she's from California. Well, I mean, so is Tillie. Just goes to show. I think her style is very... sentimental really. And indirect and opaque."

"Her nonfiction is so compelling. She finds exactly the right words that she needs to establish setting and character and not one word more."

"Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout."

"When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges."

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned."

"In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space."

"Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power."

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image."

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

"One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me."

"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"

"The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs."

"Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price."

"Writers are always selling somebody out."

"The wind shows us how close to the edge we are"

"She is a soldier. She will not be defeated."

"Her writing is so brilliant and beautiful."

"Patti Smith, the rock n roll legend...as Patti Smith sings famously, "People have the power.""

"The vital importance of Patti Smith in the history of rock and roll music cannot be overstated. An icon of the New York art scene, Smith was instrumental in the development of punk and alternative rock. From the floors of Max’s Kansas City and the CBGB club, Smith orchestrated a musical revolution that still maintains its relevance to this day, five decades later. Despite her undisputed position as the queen of punk rock, Smith’s cultural diet is incredibly broad, incorporating everything from Motown to noise rock."

"Life is filled with holes Johnny's laying there in his sperm coffin The angel looks down at him and says "Oh, pretty boy Can't you show me nothing but surrender?"

"People have the power To redeem the work of fools Upon the meek the graces shower It's decreed the people rule."

"He spared the child and spoiled the rod I have not sold myself to God!"

"Look around you, all around you Riding on a copper wave Do you like the world around you? Are you ready to behave?"

"Jesus died For somebody's sins But not mine."

"Americans just don't know what being a movie star's all about."