Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

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

A stranger is a friend you have not met before.

I don't think anyone at Fox believes they are producing even-handed, impartial coverage.

Sensitivity is equated with weakness. Feelings are for women. It's OK to express happiness or anger, but it's not OK to feel fear or sadness. This gets exaggerated in prison.

All conflict is about difference; whether the difference is race religion, or nationality.

That Days of Our Lives thing for a week nearly killed me.

I liked writing the negative ads more than - because it's more minor chords.

every one of us possesses a gene predisposing us toward rivalry, competition, and fits of envy with any past, present, or future siblings.

When I was a teenager, the number one book I was most obsessed with was 'Gone with the Wind.

If whatsoever you have been living can be conveyed by words, that means you have not lived at all.

O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.