In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilisation are ant-liberal and ant-bourgeois . . .

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

... the place we assign to pornography depends on the goals we set for our own consciousness, our own experience.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.