I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. Hes very original, very accurate and acute.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.