Quote collection
540 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing."
"I feel that I've had enough theoretical speculation to last me a lifetime."
"You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even."
"I certainly identify myself as a feminist."
"Courage is morally neutral."
"The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute"
"You can include essay elements in fiction; this is a very nineteenth century practice."
"We are ruled by quotations."
"That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer."
"Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve."
"I'm not interested in giving aid and comfort to the neo-Conservatives."
"I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis."
"The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop."
"If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well."
"That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true."
"I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think that it is less and less possible to take for granted certain cultural references."
"I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way."
"The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references."
"I'm more cautious about what I write."
"The way in which a certain kind of political idealism has been discredited and scorned makes the danger not that intellectuals keep on making fools of themselves, formulating political opinions when they might not be as informed as they might be, but that they retreat and leave politics to the professionals."