We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

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

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.