"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."

"I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States."

"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."

"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."

"It is a subtle truth that the stoutest timber is forged in the fiercest gales, not in the sheltered grove — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"Wisdom principle 61 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 18."

"In many ways, Viv and I were the only ones who were really songwriters."

"I was baptized alongside my mother when I was 8 years old. Since then, I have tried to walk a Christian life. And now that I'm getting older, I realized that I'm walking even closer with my God."