All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.
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 you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Row...
The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Real reading is a lonely activity.
Reading well is one of the great pleasures
Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.
Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.
The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.
For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a...
Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.
We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?
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 why we should read, and why we should read only th...
Every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.
Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.