Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.