Sooner Or Later, All Games Become Serious.

Their Violence (the Jungle Wars Of The '70s), And All Violence For That Matter, Reflects The Neutral Exploration Of Sensation That Is Taking Place, Within Sex As Elsewhere And The Sense That The Perversions Are Valuable Precisely Because They Provide A Readily Accessible Anthology Of Exploratory Techniques.

People, Particularly Over-moralistic Americans, Have Often Seen Me As A Pessimist And Humourless To Boot, Yet I Think I Have An Almost Maniacal Sense Of Humour. The Problem Is That It's Rather Deadpan.

The Catastrophe Story, Whoever May Tell It, Represents A Constructive And Positive Act By The Imagination Rather Than A Negative One, An Attempt To Confront The Terrifying Void Of A Patently Meaningless Universe By Challenging It At Its Own Game. [. . .] Each One Of These Fantasies Represents An Arraignment Of The Finite, An Attempt To Dismantle The Formal Structure Of Time And Space Which The Universe Wraps Around Us At The Moment We First Achieve Consciousness.

The Surrealists, And The Modern Movement In Painting As A Whole, Seemed To Offer A Key To The Strange Postwar World With Its Threat Of Nuclear War. The Dislocations And Ambiguities, In Cubism And Abstract Art As Well As The Surrealists, Reminded Me Of My Childhood In Shanghai.

I Suspect That Many Of The Great Cultural Shifts That Prepare The Way For Political Change Are Largely Aesthetic. A Buick Radiator Grille Is As Much A Political Statement As A Rolls Royce Radiator Grille, One Enshrining A Machine Aesthetic Driven By A Populist Optimism, The Other Enshrining A Hierarchical And Exclusive Social Order.