I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

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.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

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