A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

How boring just to be a body.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.