I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

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

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

Experience is not necessarily accumulated over the extent of time lived. In my opinion, it is accumulated over the degree and variety of activities a person has been involved in

Non-duality has been the root of all religious movements on this planet.

you are a volume in the divine booka mirror to the power that created the universewhatever you want, ask it of yourselfwhatever you're looking for can only be foundinside of you

I have always thought it morally unacceptable to kill stories, not to run stories, that people have risked their lives to get.

When you meditate your body shouldn't move. Some people get into this kundalini sway business. Your body shouldn't move.

Persons of rank do not talk about such trifles as the common people do; but the common people do not busy themselves about such frivolous things as do persons of rank.

Aidan to Jude: What's wrong with running away if where you were didn't suit you? Doesn't it follow you're funning to something else? Something that does suit you?

The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.