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

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.

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

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

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

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.