I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.