I Am Naive Enough To Read Incessantly

I Have Never Believed That The Critic Is The Rival Of The Poet, But I Do Believe That Criticism Is A Genre Of Literature Or It Does Not Exist.

The True Use Of Shakespeare Or Of Cervantes, Of Homer Or Of Dante, Of Chaucer Or Of Rabelais, Is To Augment One's Own Growing Inner Self. . . . 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, That Solitude Whose Final Form Is One's Confrontation With One's Own Mortality.

I Realized Early On That The Academy And The Literary World Alike - And I Don't Think There Really Is A Distinction Between The Two - Are Always Dominated By Fools, Knaves, Charlatans And Bureaucrats.

To Read In The Service Of Any Ideology Is Not, In My Judgment, To Read At All.

What I Think I Have In Common With The School Of Deconstruction Is The Mode Of Negative Thinking Or Negative Awareness, In The Technical, Philosophical Sense Of The Negative, But Which Comes To Me Through Negative Theology.