Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

To photograph is to confer importance.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

One could plausibly argue that it is for quite sound reasons that the whole capacity for sexual ecstasy is inaccessible to most people - given that sexuality is something, like nuclear energy, which may prove amenable to domestication through scruple, but then again may not.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.