...to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

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

I love to read the way people love to watch television.

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism