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

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

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.