Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.

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.

The age of the book is almost gone.

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

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

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