Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

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

Memories are those endless treasures, which we can keep exploring till eternity and bask in their glory like a slow swinging hammock!

If you want to know what you are attracting, look around you!

The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's smile at someone and receive a smile in return are to me continual spiritual exercises.

I can be an emotional eater. Of late, I have been doing that, yes. It started when I was very little. My brothers were gone on tour a lot, and I would miss them so much.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

I have a thing for men's boxer briefs and a tank top. If I'm wearing them, I'm a happy gal.

When you see the flower of happiness on your way, don't take it immediately; sit and watch it and realise how rare it is!

Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides.

I know and value what it means to wake up and be alive and to share my story. I'm so blessed to be here and to be able to talk about it.