The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.