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.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

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

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.