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

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

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

The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.

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