Real Reading Is A Lonely Activity.

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

We Read To Find Ourselves, More Fully And More Strangely Than Otherwise We Could Hope To Find.

More Even Than Southern Presbyterians And Southern Methodists, The Baptists Provided The Great Mass Of Confederate Enlisted Men.

I Won't Say He [shakespeare] 'invented' Us, Because Journalists Perpetually Misunderstand Me On That. I'll Put It More Simply: He Contains Us. Our Ways Of Thinking And Feeling-about Ourselves, Those We Love, Those We Hate, Those We Realize Are Hopelessly 'other' To Us-are More Shaped By Shakespeare Than They Are By The Experience Of Our Own Lives.

You Know, I Don't Want To Be Offensive. But 'infinite Jest' [regarded By Many As Wallace's Masterpiece] Is Just Awful. It Seems Ridiculous To Have To Say It. He Can't Think, He Can't Write. There's No Discernible Talent.