Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture

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