Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. But if one could only strike the ball with sufficient force, with perfect….

Every decoding is another encoding..

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one….

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on..

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria..

I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It's a dying art..

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces.

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards..

Information is the religion of the modern world..

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery o….

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary..

It was Adam Appleby's misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted….

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deductio….

That's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone ….

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words ….

Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit..

whhheeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! The scream of jet engines rises to a crescendo on the runways of the world. Every second, somewhere or other, a plane touches….

Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut - at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus - and happy….

I never did like working out - it bears the same relationship to real sport as masturbation does to real sex.

To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another.

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flag….