Well, [Lorca had] a gift for gab. For example, he makes striking metaphors, but I think he makes striking metaphors for him, because I think that his world was mostly verbal. I think that he was fond of playing words against each other, the contrast of words, but I wonder if he knew what he was doing.

Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon
The author of Lear remains unshaken
Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton
What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

As for the apostolic epistles, what person who is skilled in literary interpretation would think them to be plain and easily understood, when even in them there are thousands of passages that provide, as it through a window, a narrow opening leading to multitudes of the deepest thoughts?

The Western Wing is not a work written by an individual named Wang Shifu alone; if I read it carefully, it will also be a work of my own creation, because all the words in The Western Wing happen to be the words that I want to say and that I want to write down.

Cao Xueqin is a master of language. His prose is so exquisite and aesthetically pleasing that it almost attains perfection in every way.

A masterpiece of the first order in Chinese literature.