Enemies are somewhere else, as the fighting is almost always “over there,” with Islamic fundamentalism now replacing Russian and Chinese communism as the implacable, furtive menace. And “terrorist” is a more flexible word than “communist.” It can unify a larger number of quite different struggles and interests. What this may mean is that the war will be endless---since there will always be some terrorism.

I'm more cautious about what I write.

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.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real. ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.