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

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

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

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

Culture is public, because meaning is

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