Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask if we cannot trust the Bible what can we trust?

Writing a novel is a terrible experience during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams which nature can't touch with decay.

On the basis of biological sociological and historical knowledge we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay but the sum total of individual achievement for better or worse lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.

A government for protecting business only is but a carcass and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations that tries to transform decay into something generative that is replicative in a baroque way that isn't about progress and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'

In a decaying society art if it is truthful must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.