The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

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.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.