"

Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

"

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and p...more

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

"

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

"

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, poli...more

"

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

"

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

"

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

"

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes s...more

"

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden