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

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.