For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

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.

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

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

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.