Wisdom worth sharing, words worth remembering.
The love of the famous like all strong passions is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically and it is independent of persons.
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and often is all that remains of it.
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
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.
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.
I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
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.
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day year after year alone.