In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.

The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

... 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.

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism