Pornography and cooking shows have created two new spectator sports.
The past is always waiting to entangle and deflect us.
The past goes right on pulling me apart, though I can scarcely remember the people or the issues.
To avoid tripping on the chain of the past, you have to pick it up and wind it about you.
The present necessarily betrays the past.
The poor live slow and hard; the rich, fast and easy. The rest of us shuffle along as we may.
Fame is fickle, but Obscurity is usually faithful to the end.
The world needs an enema.
A crisis unmasks everyone.
Excrement can never be culturally elaborated to the extent that nutriment can.
Machismo makes no provision for preparing lunch, doing the laundry, or minding the baby.
The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.
Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime.
Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom.
Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment.
A Museum of fetishes would give special attention to the history of underwear.
Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits.
Wallace Stevens: the Platonist celebrates endless change, but with regret.
Scholarship can find little to say about the obvious.
Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.
Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.
Orgies are an early form of what will someday become sex by committee.
Bad faith likes discourse on friendship and loyalty.
Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.
The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.
