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.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

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

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

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

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

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