Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

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

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

On the level of simple sensation and mood, making love surely resembles an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.