To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. 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.

Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.

All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, “condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.

But Hamlet is death’s ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.

American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them.

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 hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism – which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people – is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.