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

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

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

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

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.

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

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