We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope. . .

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself.

With more people, there are more voices to tune out.