Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.