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

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

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

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

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

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