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….

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men..

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention..

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

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me..

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean..

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but ….

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebra….

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails..

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to rea….

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you..

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons..

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist..

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of a….

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if y….