If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.

If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room.

Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity - a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.

The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy.

The beach was empty and dark but she couldn't hear her fear over the call of the surf.

The idea of the original had no place.

There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.

I have tried at every point to seek God's wisdom on the decisions I made, and I made it my business to speak up on behalf of the things God tells us are important to Him.

We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up or fight like hell.

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

I don't think I gave a good enough performance to be nominated for it. I thought I gave a fine performance, but those things are supposed to be about giving an extraordinary performance.

God always works with workers and moves with movers, but He does not sit with sitters.

Even though my mother had told me growing up that, 'If you win, nobody cares what color you are,' that wasn't necessarily true in the N.F.L.