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How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if yo...more

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We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; ...more

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There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in whic...more

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You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

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We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

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Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

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The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is ...more

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When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation fr...more

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The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

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Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

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Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

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Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

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Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

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Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

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A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality