"There is this visual culture which is everywhere, you know, and which is very powerful in film and television and movies and which I think ... is profoundly destructive. It degrades human faculties to specialize them to the reception of visual stimuli. ... It's very, very important for human depth of thinking and of self-awareness and conscious of the world to continue to read fiction--good fiction... in which they have to translate symbols on a page into an imaginative experience. That translation is crucial in deepening the self and in giving the self actually active power to imagine the world. And I think as the visual becomes more and more pronounced, we have to launch a sort of rear guard counter-attack campaign to stress the sacredness of the book."