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

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.

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.

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

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.

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