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.

Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

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.

Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.

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.

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