I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

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

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

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

Shakespeare is universal.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.