"Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others."

"AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder."

"A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask."

"All. . . forms of consensus about "great" books and "perennial" problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of "what is already known.""

"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."