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

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

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

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

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

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

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.