Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.

The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.