Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.