In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

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

Experiences aren't pornographic; only images and representations - structures of the imagination - are.

the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.