The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

When I saw that study I was not convinced of the significance of the failure of the monkeys. There are many ways for an experiment to fail and most failures are not scientifically interesting. I immediately thought: we could do that in starlings.