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

Real reading is a lonely activity.

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.

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

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.