The tragic sense of life in Don Quixote is also the faith of Moby Dick. Ahab is a monomaniac; so is the kindlier Quixote, but both are tormented idealists who seek justice in human terms, not as...

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen

For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.

If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

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.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without...

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its...

The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including...

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.