Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.

If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

The film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] opens with an Albanian blood feud and goes on to delve into, for instance, prison systems, underpaid tomato pickers, the gulf oil spill. It's all woven together in a sensuous, oblique way that's not the same as the single-message kind of documentary we're used to, with an "answer" at the end. It's more like an exploration. Sort of like what you do with Birth of a Nation.