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

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

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.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

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

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