Writing is a mysterious activity.

The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Quotation is a method of appropriation which is invincible, I think. It's not a procedure which displeases me, contrary to recycling.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.