The Map and the Territory (Vintage International)

The essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated,

While the most insignificant animal species take thousands, sometimes millions of years to disappear, manufactured products are wiped off the surface of the globe in a few days; they’re never given a second chance, they can only suffer, powerless, the irresponsible and fascistic diktat of product-line managers who of course know better than anyone

“What defines a man? What’s the question you first ask a man, when you want to find out about him? In some societies, you ask him first if he’s married, if he has children; in our society, we ask first what his profession is. It’s his place in the productive process, and not his status as reproducer, that above all defines Western man.”

“We too are products,” he went on, “cultural products. We too will become obsolete. The functioning of the system is identical—with the difference that, in general, there is no obvious technical or functional improvement; all that remains is the demand for novelty in its pure state.

Amid the generalized physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.

You can work alone for years, it’s actually the only way to work, truth be told; but there always comes a moment when you feel the need to show your work to the world, less to receive its judgment than to reassure yourself about the existence of this work, or even of your own existence, for in a social species individuality is little more than a sh

to be an artist, in his view, was above all to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages, that you would be led, for want of a better word and in the absence of any religious belief, to describe as intuitions, messages which nonetheless commanded you in an imperious and categorical manner, without le

Jasselin was completely in favor of siliconed breasts, which demonstrate in the woman a certain erotic goodwill, which is, if truth be told, the most important thing in the world on the erotic level, and delays by ten or even twenty years the disappearance of the couple’s sex life.

Her professional life could thus be summarized as teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins,