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

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

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

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

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.