The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

False values begin with the worship of things.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.