No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

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

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.

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

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.

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.