“Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.”

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Saddam Hussein has been brutal against his people, but when he was committing those crimes, the international community did not come to the rescue of the Iraqis.

Refugees of all kinds were constantly fleeing from Christendom to the Islamic lands. Jews of course and Muslims of course, but even some Christians and the movement of refugees went overwhelmingly that way.

Muslims have their own tradition on limited government. Now in Islam, there is a very strong political tradition. Because the different circumstances, Islam is political from the very beginning.

If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it’s probably not broad enough a coalition.

The international community would like to see an agreement in Libya before Ramadan, let me be very cautious about the possibilities for an agreement.

I came up in the community center. I used to be physical director of the South Central Community Center in Chicago on 83rd. It’s still there. It used to be around there when I was a kid.

As far as I’m concerned, those wussboys should sever all ties with the horror community if that’s the way they feel and get out of the way so real horror writers can do their work.

I mean now you have Muslims in the Muslim world who can compare their situations with people elsewhere and they find that very humiliating.