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

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 into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

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

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

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

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

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.