Religion, art, taste, and other delusions.
The pretense that empty and prolix speeches are noble, that pedestrian performances are scintillating, that crude and mawkish poetry is stirring and profound — this celebration of kitsch is the most degrading aspect of official public spectacle.
There ought to be a small but discernible difference between your favorites and what you think best: a large difference is snobbery, and no difference is also snobbery, of an opposite kind.
The worst disaster in the movies is to find a bag of money.
A taste for bad people sometimes indicates a defect of character; a taste for bad art always does.
What makes an established religion? The power to punish blasphemy.
The more that is shown, the less that is suggested; and to show everything, suggesting nothing, is pornography, regardless of the subject.
The contemporary doctrine that art should shock, and the greater the shock the better the art, is the last twilit ruin of Longinian aesthetics — sublimity for a jaded age.
The punishment for a hit is to watch your aging audience stifle their boredom while they wait for you to play it, at every show, until you quit or die.
Heaven we believe in: Hell we are familiar with.
For every piece of pornography, no matter how crude or explicit, critics can be found to praise its bold, transgressive, sophisticated commentary on the acts in question.