Nothing is more beautiful than freedom, and nothing more grotesque than its molestation.

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque...

My surname for a mask to pretend!I have no stand to protest,but I will find it” (in the poem ‘Tatiana Naturova at Time’s End’ in the collection ‘The Green Divorce’)

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then...

I want to get the huge wart that looks like a nose removed from my back, but first I’m going to try to grow a mustache underneath it, to make it less noticeable.

The teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first...

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the...

There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque.

But if it so happens … a work … under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy … [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other...

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great...

And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from...