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

[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.