I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don't cost much to be housed.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.