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.

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

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

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

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

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