You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

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.

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

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.

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

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.