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.

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

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

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

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

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.