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

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.

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.