Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.