Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.