I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.