War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.