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

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

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

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

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

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

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