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

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

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.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

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

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.

Literature is achieved anxiety.