Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation..

If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations..

Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian….

One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It….

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit mediu….

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple….

I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human be….

If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a can….

It is a world of words that creates a world of things..

he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone..

Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his….

No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, ….

You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.” “I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you.….

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds..

All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of nat….

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined..

Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a ….

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately ….

The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness..

It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise ma….

My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think….