There is no method except yourself.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

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

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

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

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.

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.