If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.