"

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

"

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

"

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

"

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

"

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.

"

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

"

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

"

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

"

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

"

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western ...more

"

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, accordi...more