I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

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.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

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.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.