People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

Beneath every history, another history.

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.