It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.

There must always be some pretentiousness about literature, or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments.

Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?

I think if a third of all novelists and maybe two-thirds of all the poets now writing dropped dead suddenly, the loss to literature would not be great.

Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.