That tendency of social thought to generalize, to describe a leading tendency in a society in such a way that it seems that everything falls within its iron laws, is very common. Of course our own experience tells us that life is not as monochrome as these thinkers depict it. On the other hand they are very valuable because they alert us to transformations we are likely to take for granted.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.