If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.