Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

Modern discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised.

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

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.

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