American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

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

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.