How did people ever swallow the supposition that the real Warhol was a white-wigged idiot standing around saying, “Great”?

“Black culture doesn’t lack for modernist and postmoder­nist artists, just their critical equivalents. And now that, like Spielberg’s Poltergeist, they’re here, might as well face up to the fact that there’s no avoiding the recondite little suckers”

“The situationists were bent on discovering the absolute ability to criticize anyone, anywhere — without re­straint, without the pull of alliances, and without self-satisfaction. And they were bent on turning that criticism into event.”

“Our failure to devise an effective response to AIDS is partly a product of the silence of our culture. We are raised to regard epidem­ics as relics of distant lands and ancient eras; when an outbreak does occur, it seems unprecedented, unnatural.”

"To me, he contains or at least suggests everything I would ever want of, or think to do in, a book. For, isn't it all about freedom finally anyway?"

“Just as the gospels and Pauline writings were the Bible of Christianity in the past, so 'Leaves of Grass' would be the Bible of Cosmic civilization in the future”

"Nothing quite like the beat demimonde exists anymore, not with the same literary élan, the same desperate vitality. Being a poor New York writer or painter has become too expensive — or too crushing — to permit such animated congregation"

"Like a number of other black women writers, I have made it a point to speak of our 'tradition,' yet I know that no such tradition is assumed by the rest of the world, primarily because our books have not been read or taught"

"In Hemingway, to suffer or to cause suffering is not an unfortunate fatality of the human condition: It is the test through which man transcends his miserable circum­stances and wins moral greatness"

"Lester ennobled the ludicrous inner life of pop fans by telling the truth about it — by discerning that inner lives, and not music, were what pop music was about"