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

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

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

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

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.

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