Sometimes I dread loneliness more than bores. Other times, the reverse.
Curiosity makes loneliness.
Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.
We take refuge in illness and then are trapped there.
Satire is born of the cities it denounces.
Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead.
Let's have some good, old-fashioned literature, with a virgin and a moral.
The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.
Literature may be false, but it is not trivial.
Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.
The critic roams through culture, looking for prey.
Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.
Rule of criticism: only attend to the shape, and the purpose will manifest itself.
A critic who uses new quotations is making important changes.
Self-esteem is not based on itself.
Our detachments move us toward freedom and death.
Commitments, not feelings, hold life together.
The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.
Technique bridges among ideas, and sometimes generates them.
Rule of science: only exclude purpose, and Nature will reveal her causes.
The right time to die is never exactly now.
Death promises nothing--not even oblivion.
Only death rescues us from dying.
Death is hacking away at my address book and party lists.
Death is just around the corner. If only it would stay there.
