taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

I'm interested in the possibility of fiction which straddles narrative and essay.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

A good listener: a physical presence that is warm, alert, intelligent - more important than any words.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

The white race is the cancer of human history.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.