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.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.