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

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

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.

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

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

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

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