Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

Death is the ultimate negative.