When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation.

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

Everything is going to change. We just need to see how those changes are going to play out, for better or worse.

Satisfaction with results will be the [death] knell of progress. No man is good who thinks that he cannot be better. He has no holiness who thinks that he is holy enough.

Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I'm exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I've set out to do.

By your own efforts waken yourself, watch yourself. And live joyfully.

I usually wake up far after breakfast. So I have no other choice but to go straight to dinner.

It's only at this age that I can say the word 'art' without flinching.

I don't like to listen to music while I'm working.

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

The snow continues with high winds we remain at this camp to day in consequence of the weather.

Antipater uses us favourably if he looks upon us as staves, but very hardly if he considers us as freemen.