We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.