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

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

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

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

Literature is achieved anxiety.

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.