There is no method except yourself.

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

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.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.