People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves.
Communism is fascism with a human face.
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot – whatever the artist’s personal intention – advocate anything at all.
The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure – though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.
The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.
Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.
Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.
America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.
To the militant, identity is everything.
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.
It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.
It is passivity that dulls feeling.
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.
In photographing dwarfs, you don’t get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.
Why wouldn’t you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It’s far more interesting to write about others.