If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.