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

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

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.

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

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

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.