It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing.

... liberal intellectualstend to have a classical theory of politics, in which the state has a monopoly of power; hoping thatthose in positions of authority may prove to be enlightened men, wielding power justly, they are natural, if cautious, allies of the "establishment.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.