Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-​destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.