We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

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

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.