Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.