In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms-the animation, the fits.

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Taste has no system and no proofs.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.