The real leader has no need to lead-he is content to point the way.

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

I don't know whether you've ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it. Well, you can imagine how that affects you.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again ... No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken, let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world-it's the American way of looking at things.