The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.