Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.