Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.