When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

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

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

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