"I can't say I'm anything like a devoted animal rights activist, but I certainly oppose cruelty to animals."

“Mania starts off fun, not sleeping for days, keeping company with your brain, which has become a wonderful computer, showing 24 TV channels all about you. That goes horribly wrong after awhile.”

“And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.”

Source : Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.

“The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.”

“I noticed you right away.” She gave me an approving look. “I like quiet, polite men. And men who wear Hugo Boss. I was hoping you weren’t gay. Or that you were only half-gay. Like Paul.” “Uh…sorry,” I said. “It’s pretty much full-time now. The pay’s not great, but the perks…”

“Biblically speaking, to hear and not to do is not to hear at all.”

“Innocence is suffering and the loss of that innocence is something to fear.”

Source : Diane Wakoski (1988). “Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987”, p.102, David R. Godine Publisher

“In a universe of love there can be no heaven which tolerates a chamber of horrors.”

“The ocean, after all, is not about stability but about change. Change is normal. Everything changes. All the time.”