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.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

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

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.