The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty -- of the indefinite expansion of possibility. |
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. |
The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons. |
the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world. |
The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions. |
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions |
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. |
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 problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication. |
The quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human growth. . . the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making gray neurotics of most of us. . . |
The standard that a society should actually embody its own professed principles is a utopian one, in the sense that moral principles contradict the way things really are --- and always will be. How things really are --- and always will be --- is neither all-evil nor all-good but deficient, inconsistent, inferior. Principles invite us to do something about the morass of contradictions in which we function morally. Principles invite us to clean up our act; to become intolerant of moral laxity and compromise and cowardice and the turning away from what is upsetting: that secret gnawing of the heart that tells us that what we are doing is not right, and so counsels us that we'd be better off just not thinking about it. |
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste. |
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. |
The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie. |
The Way We Live Now |