Sometimes One Succeeds, Sometimes One Fails.

Shakespeare Is Universal.

Unless You Have Read And Absorbed The Best That Can Be Read And Absorbed, You Will Not Think Clearly Or Well.

Everyone Wants A Prodigy To Fail; It Makes Our Mediocrity More Bearable.

In The Finest Critics One Hears The Full Cry Of The Human. They Tell One Why It Matters To Read.

The True Use Of Shakespeare Or Of Cervantes, Of Homer Or Of Dante, Of Chaucer Or Of Rabelais, Is To Augment One's Own Growing Inner Self. . . . The Mind's Dialogue With Itself Is Not Primarily A Social Reality. All That The Western Canon Can Bring One Is The Proper Use Of One's Own Solitude, That Solitude Whose Final Form Is One's Confrontation With One's Own Mortality.