Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.

My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.

Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.