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

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

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

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.

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

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

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.