The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.

The purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure - though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.