One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.