I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two - are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

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.