“Timelessness” must be unmasked as an exponent of the bourgeois concept of truth.

Conceptualist art is making a last desperate attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of taste by plumbing remoter and remoter depths of subart — as though taste might not be able to follow that far down. And also as though boredom did not constitute an aesthetic judgment.

Criticism tries to serve as a theoretical gunsight: what to aim at. And the gun is more like a catapult. It will have to clear the trees here on earth before it leaves the atmosphere.

Every work of art “is a window on all time.” Thomas Wolfe was an American Proust — his novels are the crystalline precipitate of a hypersensitive memory submerged within the substrate of the universal.

I do not “use” the language. I interact with it. I do not communicate via language, but with it. Language is not a tool for me, but a medium infinitely larger than any intention.

All important questions become political questions in a much more immediate sense than in the past. But to be publicly portentous one must have opinions. And to have serious opinions one must have ideas — political ideas. But one is afraid of political opinions; they involve you in partisanship and in arguments that have nothing to do with poetry.

The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future or the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged who must destroy because what exists, indeed all existence and being, outrages and provokes them.

The relation of the intellect to art can only consist in the intellect, above all the critical intellect, giving directives as to what is possible and what is not possible; it cannot become the immediate object or content of art.

Everything is relative, everything is in chains. Capitalism is a condition both of the world and of the soul.