“As a reviewer once told me, the story of Alexander’s tomb without a body is like Hamlet without the Prince…. The rest is silence.”

“Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story...told for the body to forget what it once loved.”

“A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.”

“A boy once told me that love without heartbreak is just a pretty myth.”

“She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.”

“What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?”