Translation is the art of failure.

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

If culture did not filter, it would be inane - as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.