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

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

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.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

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.

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.