“But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.”
“I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.”
“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough that we need to know ourselves better that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.”
“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.”
“Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.”
“The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.”