...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the edges of the pulpit as they depart from it. Members of the congregation carry Bibles to church services; the paster announces a long passage text for his sermon and waits for people to find it, then reads only the first verse of it before he takes off. The Book has become a talisman.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Literature is achieved anxiety.

It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

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

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.