The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

• Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
• Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.
• 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.
• 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.
• Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.
• A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.