“The right to pursue happiness sends me and other Americans, even here where we are meant to resist outside temptation, on a hunt for it. If I’m not hungry, I might seek other forms of happiness, or pleasure, which is part of my American birthright, though the most misconceived notion of them or the most difficult to realize; I can pursue several means and ways to be happy, if I am able to forget what makes me habitually sad.”

“I like to believe I enjoy surprises, that I'm someone to whom an eruption of the unusual should be usual, or who branches out to advance the implausible. I might fly a jet, become a man, walk backward without a care, threaten like a stalker, speak freely at all times, swim the Atlantic on a greasy back, be silent for months like a Carthusian ...”

“How many performance artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?I don't know. I left early.”

“I once heard that the French don't prosecute people who commit crimes of passion twenty minutes after waking.”

“My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover's croon, Come to me, come, only I can make you truly happy, oh, how happy I'll make you, don't resist, remember how you moan with pleasure the instant we touch.....”

“I think I understand that religious faith which makes the holy brave and strong; my strength is just somewhere else--it's in myself...I do not fear what may await me, though I'm equally confident that nothing awaits.”

“The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.”