Our connection to the great myths of our natures is murky. A mother might see the Medea in herself without imagining she will ever do away with her children.

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish.

The death of an Italian tailor might not be calamitous in Catania or Cagliari, but the loss to Soho is immeasurable. We don't have Italian tailors we can spare here.

'Great Expectations', in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives club could ever be.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

My mother was in vaudeville, but after she had her children, she quit working.