Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

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.

How boring just to be a body.

There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.