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

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

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.

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

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.

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