What we need is to use what we have.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

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.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.