[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

The only interesting ideas are heresies.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.