Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

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

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.