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.

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 letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

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

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.

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

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.