All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. - Susan Sontag

Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.