Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

The young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinon that the other thinks too much.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.