Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.