Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

Avoid the mindless chaos that pervades vast swathes of society.

It was like I couldn't think of any words. Now I can think of about nine million." "How many words are in the English language?""Not the point.

You will never get to your destination on time if choose to walk two paths through life.

New Zealand, by the way, where I was ambassador, has had two women prime ministers - one from either party.

A good marriage shuts out a very great deal.

Knowing what I do now, I don't know if I'd ever have the balls to go to film school, with no connections and no knowledge of the business side at all.

Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music, and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.

We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.

We all know them — the unstructured person whose every action seems aimless and the totally organized person whose every action defeats some purpose.