If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

An important job of the critic is to savage what is mediocre or meretricious.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Literature usually begets literature.

The white race is the cancer of human history.

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

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.