Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

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

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

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

Hate spreads in the direction it is blown, but love spreads in all directions.

I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don't like. No other criterion exists for me.

I love paperwhites - they smell heavenly and you can often pick them up from a big home improvement store garden center already planted in pretty terra cotta pots.

I don't think you can run around and crash and bang quite the way that I might have done in the past.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

The moment I made that decision to get in the studio and actually work and study the culture of hip-hop, then everything just started to open up and blossom for me.

Feelings come, and feelings go, and feelings are deceiving. My warrant is the Word of God, naught else is worth believing.

The secret of life', he said, 'is to become very very good at somethin' that's very very 'ard to do.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

Men don't hear women.