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

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

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

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

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

To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.