There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar "queen", alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.

Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.