The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Courage is morally neutral.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

I want to live as long as possible, just to see how stupid it gets.

Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.