“One ‘falls’ in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It’s less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one’s life. Or maybe it’s better always to be in love with several people at any given time.”

“Freud is famously supposed to have asked, ‘Lord, what do women want?’ Imagine a world in which it seems normal to inquire, ‘Lord, what do men want?’…but who can imagine such a world?”

“I’ve got this thing—my mind—it gets bigger, its appetite is insatiable. It’s not that I’ve sacrificed everything to it, but that it’s the only thing that works.”

“I think the highest duty of a writer is to write well—to leave the language in better rather than worse shape after one’s passage. That’s an ethical obligation. Language is the body, and also the soul, of consciousness.”

“Literature is dialogue; responsiveness. Literature might be described as the history of human responsiveness to what is alive and what is moribund as cultures evolve and interact with one another.”

“The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation⎯however minute. I want the encounter with a person or a work of art to change everything.”

“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

“Despise violence. Despise national vanity and national self-love. Try to imagine once a day that you are not an American.”

“Ideas move me.”

“We were so sure who our enemies were… so sure who were the virtuous and who the benighted…. We thought we loved justice; many of us did. But we did not love the truth enough.”