How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

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

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

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

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

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.