Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year's prayer, not a resolution. I'm praying for courage.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.