The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

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.

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

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.

Who fights may lose, but who does not fight has lost already.

WHAT WE NEED IN AMERICA TODAY IS A VIGOROUS RETURN TO THE GOD OF OUR FATHERS AND A MOST VIGOROUS DEFENSE AGAINST THE MINION OF GODLESSNESS AND ATHEISM.

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms.

You count up your dead, every one. Always. Recall them, each and all - every face, every heart.

Someday you will look back on all the awful stuff that's happening to you, and fondly smile. Doesn't say much about the future, does it?

If I can go through what I've been through and do a television show with my son and then be a boy from the hood making records for the people I make records for, that's reality.

The scenes of existence can be modified. One creates his own circumstances.

Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.