20 quotes
American literary critic, scholar, and writer (1930–2019)
“Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.”
"Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable."
on Truth
"Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it."
on Wisdom
"All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life."
on Writing
"Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self."
"One reads for oneself and for strangers."
"Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes"
"Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden"
"King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life."
on Life
"Originality must compound with inheritance."
on Creativity
"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."
"You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock."
on Time
"Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge."
on Love
"It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory."
on Philosophy
"All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home."
"The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern."
"We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own."
"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you."
"A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality"
on Art
"Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily."
