“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”

“Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another. -- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73”

“Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.”

“The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.”

“A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”

“For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of the human body, the very phenomenon of the human body, is intimately linked to "the problems of painting": "Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these [correspondences] in turn give rise to some [external] visible shape in which anyone else would recognize those motifs which support his own inspection of the world?" Painting brings forth a carnal visuality, an embodied and incarnate image, by establishing the internal equivalent ("in me") of the outside world, which is made of the "same stuff." I am an extension of the world, but the world extends, intensifies, forms a "line of intensity," to use Gilles Deleuze's idiom, inside me. The world forms a "strange system of exchanges" with me; I am constituted in an exchange with the world. Painting makes this continuity visible, is itself the visualization of this continuity, of this blending of the inside and out. Images—"designs" and "paintings"—says Merleau-Ponty, are "the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.”

“Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these.”

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”

“As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.”

“Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.”