Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

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.

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

Literature is achieved anxiety.