I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contaminati….

...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the edges ….

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered a….

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads..

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The m….

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find..

Real reading is a lonely activity..

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers..

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unf….

To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all..

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for ….

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distin….

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us….

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order..

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths..

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read..

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love wi….

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophic….

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American..

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own..

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?.