The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

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

We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

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.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.