All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is..

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, b….

I won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our wa….

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable..

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….

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

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

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

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….

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

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

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….

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 ….

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

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

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

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

Real reading is a lonely activity..

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….

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….

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