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

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

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

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.

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.

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