Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

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.

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

Anybody have the right to defend himself by carrying a gun but nobody have the right to kill others because he is carrying a gun

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you've lived in one all your life.

I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success.

It's a scary word, 'cancer.'

It is never too late to begin rebuilding, Though all into ruins your life seems hurled; For see! how the light of the New Year is gilding The wan, worn face of the bruised old world.

Taoism is not a religion, although perhaps it has been made into one by some people. Lao Tsu's way of life occurs in any spiritual philosophy.

A victor's mentality becomes a victor's reality.

The member of a contractual society is free because he serves others only in serving himself. What restrains him is only the inevitable natural phenomenon of scarcity.

Easter means that Christmas worked.