The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

We are ruled by quotations.

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.