Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.