“Taste has no system and no proofs.”
“Perversity is the muse of modern literature.”
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”
“Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.”
“What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.”
“Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.”
“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”
“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”
“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”
“The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
“The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.”
“In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.”
“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”
“AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.”
“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”
“Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.”
“A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”
“Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.”
“Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated.”
“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
“The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion of possibility.”
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
“Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.”
“Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
“A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.”
“What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.”
“Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.”