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

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding

Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.