What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

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.

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.

In his voice resonated the timbre of a man who thinks he has convinced himself of an idea, but masks his own doubt by laboring to persuade others.

Revenge and rational thought never sleep together.

First wrong by brow-beater abuses the body of law. And the revenge of brow-beaten announces that there is no law in state. Says Bhutta

Animals... are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.

Economic history is the most fundamental branch of history; not the most important. Foundations exist to carry better things.

If you choose the right people for the group, it goes a little bit differently. At the same time, you can't always predict what's going to happen. Success might change people.

Musical revolutions, I don't know how many I've been through.

The real spiritual power is enabling beings to realize the nature of the mind. That's the power of Buddha activity.