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

Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the 'ego of the other player crumbling.'

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

More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

The age of the book is almost gone.

The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.