The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause /it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).

American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.