“I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.”
“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ''spirit'' over matter.”
“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 discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.”
“Taste has no system and no proofs.”
“Perversity is the muse of modern literature.”
“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”
“Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.”
“What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.”
“Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.”
“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”
“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”
“The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
“The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.”
“In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.”
“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”
“AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.”
“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.”
“Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.”
“A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”
“Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.”
“Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated.”
“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.”
“Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.”
“Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.”
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”