Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

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.

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

I just don’t know where to go from here, Alex.”“You don’t have to, we can trace our map together.

Everyone knows he's crazier than a shaved mule in a toboggan race.

I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.’‘Of what?’‘Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.

To live your life in the fear of losing it is to lose the point of life.

The best evidence of merit is a cordial recognition of it whenever and wherever it may be found.

I once had a crush on one of my teachers. I wrote him a love letter and stuck it in a bag in his office. I didn’t write my name on it, but I’m sure he figured out it was me.

A lot of people have said it to me 'You made me cry.' And it was only because I cried myself when I watched the movie.

I'm growing very talented at watching blood and guts on screen because I have zero emotional response.

Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.

Dying's not so bad. At least I won't have to answer the telephone.