Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere..

Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning thr….

I was in a garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes I was alone, sitting on a bench between two long hedges of roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I fel….

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally el….

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too..

Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of sugges….

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience….

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature..

The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, rea….

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality..

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable..

Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a fre….

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice..

Good readers make much out of little..