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.

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.

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

The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.

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

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

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.