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.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

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

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.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

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