Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poetsthemselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.

There are long stretches of the work [Paradise Lost] that are for anyone not theologically minded sheer howling boredom from the point of view of the content.

Montag, os velhos que ficam em casa, receosos, cuidando de seus ossos quebradiços como casca de amendoim, não têm nenhum direito de criticar.

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

The most important thing about reading is not the level of sophistication of the books on your self. There is no prerequisite reading regimen for being a bookworm.

It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.

Most critics agree with the seventeenth-century printer who gave them to the world, that the Mutabilitie Cantos seem to be part of some following book of The Faerie Queene.

...If you genuinely believe that only the death of a loved one can motivate a human being to take up a cause...then get your pathetic, cynical ass out of my way so I can do my job!

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.

I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature