If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

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.

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people.

It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.