Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

My ignorance is not charming.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up