The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.