Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.