There Is No Method Except Yourself.

I Would Say That There Is No Future For Literary Studies As Such In The United States.

It Is Hard To Go On Living Without Some Hope Of Encountering The Extraordinary.

What Matters In Literature In The End Is Surely The Idiosyncratic, The Individual, The Flavor Or The Color Of A Particular Human Suffering.

I Realized Early On That The Academy And The Literary World Alike - And I Don't Think There Really Is A Distinction Between The Two - Are Always Dominated By Fools, Knaves, Charlatans And Bureaucrats.

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; That We Require Knowledge, Not Just Of Self And Others, But Of The Way Things Are. Yet The Strongest, Most Authentic Motive For Deep Reading…is The Search For A Difficult Pleasure.