Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

Literature is achieved anxiety.

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

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