It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

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.

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

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

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

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

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.