The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.