To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

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

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown.

Prayer is the great engine to overthrow and rout my spiritual enemies the great means to procure the graces of which I stand in hourly need.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

They can say I have an opinion about something.

[America] needs a certain thinking.

Wealth per se I never too much valued, and my acquaintance with its possessors has by no means increased my veneration for it.

You're dealing with people who are suiciding slowly. You've got to get to the bottom of what is psychologically motivating them to self-destruct.

Cause we they leaders, and they the followers And we the nut-busters and they the swallowers'

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.