I Am Naive Enough To

People Cannot Stand The Saddest Truth I Know About The Very Nature Of Reading And Writing Imaginative Literature, Which Is That Poetry Does Not Teach Us How To Talk To Other People: It Teaches Us How To Talk To Ourselves. What I'm Desperately Trying To Do Is To Get Students To Talk To Themselves As Though They Are Indeed Themselves, And Not Someone Else.

At Our Present Bad Moment, We Need Above All To Recover Our Sense Of Literary Individuality And Of Poetic Autonomy.

The World Does Not Get To Be A Better Or A Worse Place; It Just Gets More Senescent.

Aesthetic Value Emanates From The Struggle Between Texts: In The Reader, In Language, In The Classroom, In Arguments Within A Society. Aesthetic Value Rises Out Of Memory, And So (as Nietzsche Saw) Out Of Pain, The Pain Of Surrendering Easier Pleasures In Favour Of Much More Difficult Ones ... Successful Literary Works Are Achieved Anxieties, Not Releases From Anxieties.

Personality, In Our Sense, Is A Shakespearean Invention.