Here should be a picture of my favorite apple. It is also a nude & bottle. It is also a landscape. There are no such things as still lifes. —Erica Jong

You don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen, simply wait. Don't even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. —Franz Kafka

To the memory of Keith Wyman and Betty Bowen: if there is a place where people go after death, its proprietors have got their hands full with those two To everybody whose letters I haven't answered. And to G.R., special delivery.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting—with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui—for something momentous to occur.

Quotations