The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Self-censorship, the most important and most successful form of censorship, is rampant. Debate is identified with dissent, which is in turn identified with disloyalty. There is a widespread feeling that, in this new, open-ended emergency, we may not be able to 'afford' our traditional freedoms.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Everything has changed and nothing is changed.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.