Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

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

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility.

The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.