At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

Originality must compound with inheritance.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

It takes work to become the person you were created to be. You're worth the work!

I don't need to come closer to kill you, but I will come closer to watch you bleed. (Darius)

The means and the results, the good and the bad, are within all of us who are aware and care.

The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

Don’t see the mind for more than it is, but don’t misread it for all that it can be.

If V’lane were a signpost, it would read Abandon All Personal Will, Ye Who Tread Here.

There are gender health differences, and we need to know what they are.

The eradication of anti-personnel mines around the world is one of the most important tasks facing the international community.

One of my weaknesses is that I actually have a conscience.

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.