The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, mush less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

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