Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art.

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces