Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.

I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

It is a strange kind of fire, the fire of self-righteousness, which gives us such pleasure by its warmth but does so little to banish the darkness.

Freedom is a matter of logistics.

Time makes things worse. Bad is faster than good. Wickedness is a weed and does not wither on its own. It grows and spreads.