Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.

I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.