I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

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.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

Each generation has to reinvent spirituality.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.