I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough..

The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible prec….

You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to….

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

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishnes….

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always domi….

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic valu….

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it in….

There is no method except yourself..

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy..

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy..

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature hap….

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes..

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene..

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary..

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence..

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of g….

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering..

Literature is achieved anxiety..

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well..

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere presen….