I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.

We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.

I am a very reclusive, private person.

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.

Once you have become the centre of a conflict in a complex governmental enterprise you have the obligation to resign.