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.

Madonna is her own Hollywood studio – a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion...