More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

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

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.

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.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.