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

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

That’s what I’d ask you to do: Hope for peace. Because I know that I would love to be able to lay down my weapon and get to being a colonist. Just like you are. Just like I want to be.

Your dreams become your destiny when your plans become your actions!

The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

Maturity comes not with age but with the acceptance of responsibility. You are only young once but immaturity can last a lifetime!

Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country's laws.

I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.

In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.

You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.

I think there's a lot that we remember almost chemically, through our DNA.