Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

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.

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

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

I dare to dream a dream, for tomorrow I shall make it my reality!

I consider myself a character actor.

Essentially, all life depends upon the soil ... There can be no life without soil and no soil without life; they have evolved together.

A garden should feel like a walk in the woods.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

It was not through democratic methods that Britain bagged India.

Cities are broke, there are no jobs, people without a high school diploma and sometimes even with a college degree can't get jobs.

No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.

It doesn't take long to play with those guys. They're so good, they really help you out in all areas of the game and make it easy on you.

This would be a great world to dance in if we didn’t have to pay the fiddler.