It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

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

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.