Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
We’ll try this first. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. That’s life, isn’t it?
Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.
I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike.
We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.