It's easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred.

On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.

Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it.

We must be able to look under the surface rather than over-analyze it and delude ourselves into thinking we’re seeing beneath it.

It was clear that everything considered important and good was insignificant and repulsive, and that all this glamour and luxury hid the old well-known crimes, which not only remained unpunished but were adorned with all the splendor men can devise.

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky.

Your secret was not the craftsman's delight in process,
which doesn't distinguish work from pleasure — your way was not to exalt nor avoid
the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant:
everything faded, thinned to nothing, beside
the light which bathed and warmed, the Presence
your being had opened to. Where it shone,
there life was, and abundantly; it touched
your dullest task, and the task was easy.

This is reality, whether you like it or not — all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

Las Vegas no less — the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner.

His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.