Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.

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

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

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.