Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

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

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

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.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.