I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

Culture is public, because meaning is

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.