Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

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

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

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

You can always be quoted.

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism