You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

What interests me is to understand the nature of the modern.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.