Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It’s part of the sizzle.

I’m worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to...

My problem is that I do not get along with lesbians at all. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them.

I remember turning ‘The Sopranos’ on once and within two minutes nearly throwing a brick through the screen.

Not untill all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son. But in a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman’s hands, there will also be no affect...

Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents.

Christianity began as a religion of the poor and dispossessed – farmers, fishermen, Bedouin shepherds. There’s a great lure to that kind of simplicity and rigor – the discipline, the call to action.

It’s aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It’s why...

Although I’m an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised.

Uncritical American boosterism – automatic endorsement of every government action – is myopic and self-defeating.

The plastic surgery issue is really looming because girls in the U.S. are getting it in their teens.

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual...

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure...

It’s time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose...

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

I’ve always felt that the obligation of teachers is to have a huge, broad overview and to provide a foundation course to the students. The long view of history is absolutely crucial.

Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of...

The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they’re dead is the nasty things I’ve said about them.

It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like...

Leftism should be about the people. That’s how it began.

Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except...

If people want to be better writers, they can’t just read the blogs! You’ve got to look at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words.

Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.

I believe that government should confine itself to the public realm and that it should be as stripped down as possible, within reason. It should not be burdened by excess bureaucracy.

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west’s stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art’s assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

Ever since Romanticism, an oppositional mode, artists have the right, and indeed the duty, to attack social convention. But it is ridiculous and in fact self-infantilizing for them to expect to be financially supported by...

I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott’s collected essays for their classes.

The moment is ripe for an experienced businessman to talk practical, prudent economics to the electorate – which is why Mitt Romney’s political fortunes are steadily being resurrected from the grave.

The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

A woman simply is, but a man must become.

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

No genuinely avant-garde artist should ever be on the government dole.

Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The...

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

I am a very reclusive, private person.

I respect the astute and rigorously unsentimental David Horowitz as one of America’s most original and courageous political analysts. He has the true 1960s spirit – audacious and irreverent, yet passionately engaged and committed to...

Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women’s movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There’s no room for dissent.

A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no...

I was the first to advocate the Web. But I am very troubled by this thing that every kid must have a laptop computer. The kids are totally in the computer age. There’s a whole...

I consider myself not a conservative libertarian but a radical ’60s libertarian.

As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature’s fascism is...

The airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan – it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by...

Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

We live in a period of declining stars. Few celebrities these days (aside from the smoldering Angelina Jolie) seem to have complex psychic lives.

Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women.