The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

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 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

You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

The Internet is ultimately about innovation and integration, but you don't get the innovation unless you integrate Web technology into the processes by which you run your business.

We need to reach that happy stage of our development when differences and diversity are not seen as sources of division and distrust, but of strength and inspiration.

You have to just go with your imagination, where your instinct takes you.

Enlightenment doesn't mean you know anything. It doesn't mean you don't know anything. It means that you've returned to the source, consciously.

The contemporary quarrel over church and state is not really about whether a wall of separation of church and state should exist or not... The real question is what does 'separation' mean?

Lack of charisma can be fatal.

We will send ships and Marines as soon as possible for the protection of American life and property.