Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.

The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.

Business owners are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an owner away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.

Power floats like money, like language, like theory.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.