The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.

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

Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Old saws have no teeth.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.