I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.