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

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

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

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

There is no method except yourself.