There are some elements in life - above all, sexual pleasure - about which it isn't necessary to have a position.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.