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

I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.

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

Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer seduced by the uncanny and the unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, he once again reaches into a magical cornucopia of folklore and fantasy and spreads before us, in enchanting language, the marvels and shocks of dybbuks, ghosts, demons, spirits, and wizards.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.