If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.