Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

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

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

There is no method except yourself.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

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

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.