An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

There is a terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things.

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

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

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