Nobody has ever seen the 'Ur-Hamlet,'

The real 'Hamlet' is of course later, first performed in 1600, then performed with revisions in 1601, and eventually included in the First Folio after Shakespeare's death, ... It really has more in common with the two major works it comes between, the two great comedies 'As You Like It' and 'Twelfth Night'.

All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures
that solitude can afford you, because it is
at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.