Real Reading Is A Lonely Activity.

The Morality Of Scholarship, As Currently Practiced, Is To Encourage Everyone To Replace Difficult Pleasures By Pleasures Universally Accessible Precisely Because They Are Easier.

No One Yet Has Managed To Be Post-shakespearean.

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 All Fear Loneliness, Madness, Dying. Shakespeare And Walt Whitman, Leopardi And Hart Crane Will Not Cure Those Fears. And Yet These Poets Bring Us Fire And Light.

Criticism In The Universities, I'll Have To Admit, Has Entered A Phase Where I Am Totally Out Of Sympathy With 95% Of What Goes On. It's Stalinism Without Stalin.