"I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right"
Marge Piercy, WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME


"For hundreds of years, people have tried to solve the enigma of Don Juan in a variety of ways, but the enigma is insoluble. The character has gone through the most disparate transformations, from the original view of him as adulterer, murderer and desecrator of the dead to the psychologically dissected weary cavalier. He lives on in tradition and legend as a violent criminal, like some force of nature, running riot against morality and justice. He is the great seducer, seduced again and again by women. They all succumb to him, but- and this may be the essential point - he is never really loved by any of them. (This is why the play does not have a single love scene.) So what is it that attracts women to Don Juan? It is not male sexuality alone, although no doubt he is its most powerful representative, but the particuarly ardent and exclusively distinct metaphysical implications of this sexuality which give him such inescapable power over women. Don Juan is forever in search of perfection, in other words something which does not exist in the world. And time and again women want to prove to him, and also to themselves, that it is possible for him to find in the world everything he is searching for. The misfortune of these women is that their horizons are wordly - only when they suspect, to their horror, that he is not searching for life but yearning for death, do they recoil from him"
Odon Von Horvath: preface to DON JUAN COMES BACK FROM THE WAR 1934


"If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecendented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there. Being a freelance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people..his job is inventing trophies of his experiences - objects and gestures that fascinate and enthrall, not merely (as prescribed by older notions of the artist) edify or entertain. His principal means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give what is, or seems to be NOT wanted. But however fierce may be the outrages the artist perpetrates upon his audience, his credentials and spiritual authority ultimately depend on the audience's sense (whether something is known or inferred) of the outrages he commits upon himself. The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness."
Susan Sontag: THE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION, (in Styles of Radical Will) 1967


"Hell is other people."
JP Sartre, HUIS CLOS