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

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.

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.

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

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.