It [The Great Gatsby] has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years....it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.