Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

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.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

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

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.