For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

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

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.