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

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

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

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

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 an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

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

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 read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.