“There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.”

“Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.”

“Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing.”

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”

“Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty.”

“Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.”

“Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.”

“Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture ("what it feels like") of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness.”

“Maybe we all just want to feel special, even for a little while, to be fooled for a bit into feeling something besides the truth of our own ordinariness.”

“They tell me that truth lies somewhere at the bottom of a well, and at virtually the door of our home is a most notable if long dried well. Our location is thus quite favorable, if we but keep patience.”