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

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.