Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Pornography is essentially reductive, an exercise in the nothing-but mode, a depersonalizing of the human beings involved, a showing-up of human lust as nothing but an affair of the genitals.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.