We might have been able to say 20 years ago that it was unanticipated consequence, but we know now that a shipload could bring in a bunch of invasive species into the Great Lakes.

She was a very funny writer but also a very thoughtful one. She made writers think and she made readers think. She was constantly playing on the difference between God and the writer.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other’s company before outside of a dictionary.

I never did like working out – it bears the same relationship to real sport as masturbation does to real sex

Cambiando de postura en el sillín, Adam pensó que la forma en que su humilde vida seguía los moldes de la literatura tenía algo como de metempsicosis. ,O quizá -se preguntó, hurgándose la nariz- era...

Walt Whitman who laid end to end words never seen in each other’s company before outside of a dictionary.

Think of a ball of steel as large as the world, and a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not...

The damages are far reaching – from the shoreline, to the pipes of power plants and municipal waterworks, to the many other lakes and rivers that are under threat and indeed under harm as zebra...

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are ”prefabricated” in the sense that we...

As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with...

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn’t have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash...

The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself...

It’s a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He’s no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one’s peers.

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils...

These species are not inherently bad. They’re just in the wrong place.

To some people, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of three or four big fan-jet engines rising in pitch, as the plane they are sitting in swivels at the end...

The electric barrier is crude but it’s the best thing we have now. The irony is the barrier was first proposed to keep round gobies (another fish invader in the Great Lakes) from colonizing the...

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round.