Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

The interwovenness of our lives is the source of our solidarity. But it also lies at the root of our mutual harm.

Revolution cannot be handed down to you by a tight-knit vanguard of conspirators. Nor, as Lenin insisted, can it be carried abroad and imposed at the point of a bayonet, as Stalin did in eastern Europe. You have to be actively involved in the making of it yourself, unlike the kind of artist who instructs his assistants to go off and pickle a shark in his name.

To be outside any situation whatsoever is known as being dead.

A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the Modern Age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazy notion that a single global system known as the free-market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.

Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is.

You’ve got to have a sense of different audiences. I’m a kind of performer manque – I come from a long line of failed actors!

Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is ‘pointing towards’ some object.