The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

Left-wing movements have tended to be unisex, and asexual in their imagery. Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. Certainly Nazism is "sexier" than communism.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.