Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

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.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up

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.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.