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

I won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our ways of thinking and feeling-about ourselves, those we love, those we hate, those we realize are hopelessly 'other' to us-are more shaped by Shakespeare than they are by the experience of our own lives.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

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

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.