People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

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

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

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