Truth is only stranger than good fiction.
Seeming
Religion, art, taste, and other delusions.
High art exists, but high-status art is what is generally meant.
Every art depends on the great lie of discontinuity: that there are moments, beginnings, ends.
Pretension is a debt, a loan taken against future learning. Sometimes the debtor pays it off; more often he becomes a bankrupt.
The Four Plots
Dragged back in
Stranger in town
Road trip
I want what he’s having
We say life imitates art because art is how we see life.
The sole sacred duty of the critic is not to praise where praise is not due.
In sane times prizes are useless. They become useful in mad times, as negative indicators.
Every policy I support seems to threaten democracy itself.
Islam is monotheist: Allah is always and everywhere the same. Christianity is polytheist: there are German, English, Latin, African, and American Christian gods, along with extinct historical versions, all incompatible and eternally at odds