In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

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

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.