Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

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

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

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

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

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 say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.