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.

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.

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

It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.