One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

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.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods.

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.