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

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

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

To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.

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.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.