David Lodge

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.