One reads for oneself and for strangers.

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.

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

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

Is it always like that?" I ask, breathless. “No, ” he says. “It's never like that.” I hear the wonder in his voice. And just like that, everything changes.

Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg.

[Hillary Clinton] is the one who raised her hand for the war in Iraq and I'm the one who has been fighting it.

Any girl can look glamorous... just stand there and look stupid.

I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word.

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

For an economy to prosper, trust between the states must be established, and their individual strengths be appreciated.

Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality.

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

If there's a heaven upon the earth, a fellow knows it when He's been away from home a week, and then gets back again.