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

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

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.

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

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

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