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.

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

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

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

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.

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.