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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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