Will some reporter or some Republican on the Sunday shows please ask why tax cuts raid the non-existent Social Security Trust Fund but all the Democrats' new spending doesn't? Will someone please ask that?

Literature is my life of course but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view I like being a teacher.

I dropped out of high school when I was 16 after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.'

Existentialism is about being a saint without God being your own hero without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

There's a really unique relationship between a single parent and their child. Marriages so easily break up. There's kind of this temporary deal about marriages. That's one of the things that makes it stressful and that's something that's nonexistent in a parent-child relationship.

My relationship with my father is pretty non-existent.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade a musical idea no matter how innovative is threatened.

My workout regimen at the moment is nonexistent. I wake up in the morning and brush my teeth. My toothbrush and deodorant are my only dumbbells. That's about it.

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out about a century ago that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

I had a non-existent knowledge of Queen Victoria's early years. Like everyone else I thought of her as an old lady dressed in black. My mom had told me about her though that she had a very loving relationship with Albert that they had lots of kids and that he died young.

But blind to former as to future fate what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

The printed page conveys information and commitment and requires active involvement. Television conveys emotion and experience and it's very limited in what it can do logically. It's an existential experience - there and then gone.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching so confidence-splattering so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn't have to come in contact with it.

Independent film is almost nonexistent right now because all the distributers that used to love to put out these little art films are all out of business right now because it costs so much to open a movie.

Right after 'Raymond' I had a world-is-my-oyster attitude but I found out I don't like oysters. I had this existential emptiness. 'What is my purpose? Who am I?' I had a big identity crisis.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is can do or is worth on an existential alchemical level.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art because to us it is false and visionary was to the makers of it true and existent.