There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.