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.
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Tidak sepenuhnya salah untuk mengatakan bahwa tidak ada yang namanya foto buruk - hanya foto yang kurang menarik, kurang relevan, kurang misterius.
Kebosanan hanyalah sisi kebalikan dari daya tarik: keduanya bergantung pada berada di luar daripada di dalam suatu situasi, dan yang satu mengarah ke yang lain.