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

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

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

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.

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

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

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.