Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.
Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.
Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.
America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.
I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.
Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.
Growth, in some curious way, I suspect, depends on being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor.
What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
