A lot of what I've written in criticism of my lust for virtue - my discovery that I've committed idolatry, making of the good an idol - is open to the charge of being still caught within the dialectic of idolatry. I've made a moral criticism of my moral consciousness. Meta-idolatry.

I'm more cautious about what I write.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.