Literature Is Achieved Anxiety.

Information Is Endlessly Available To Us; Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

Personality, In Our Sense, Is A Shakespearean Invention.

Indeed The Three Prophecies About The Death Of Individual Art Are, In Their Different Ways, Those Of Hegel, Marx, And Freud. I Don't See Any Way Of Getting Beyond Those Prophecies.

The True Use Of Shakespeare Or Of Cervantes, Of Homer Or Of Dante, Of Chaucer Or Of Rabelais, Is To Augment One's Own Growing Inner Self. . . . The Mind's Dialogue With Itself Is Not Primarily A Social Reality. All That The Western Canon Can Bring One Is The Proper Use Of One's Own Solitude, That Solitude Whose Final Form Is One's Confrontation With One's Own Mortality.

Criticism Starts - It Has To Start - With A Real Passion For Reading. It Can Come In Adolescence, Even In Your Twenties, But You Must Fall In Love With Poems.