taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits.

The really important thing is not to reject anything.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

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

My library is an archive of longings.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.