Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

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

I don't do interviews at all when I'm on tour, so this time, on a day off, I'll do that kind of thing a little bit. I don't do big promotion schedules, not when I'm touring.

I was constantly amazed by how many people talked me into arresting them.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

I'm not an icon. Not even in America.

If you refuse to be happy until you have no problems or challenges, you will probably never be happy!

My goal was just to try and be the best player on my high school team, and look where I am now. And that was still my goal as a young kid, just to try and be a little better than my brother was.

This world is all attachment. Yet you get worried because you are attached.

To love is an active verb.

I've tried it, and I've never been that girl. I'm always going to be the girl you want to take home to your parents, not for the night.

Lots of people make the stage and it can seem very violent and over the top, but it's not really. It's always a kind of gentle ballet.