Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?

I was a terrible employee. I've been fired from almost every job I've ever had, luckily, in a good way, or else I'd be stuck. I would always joke around with everybody, and no one enjoyed my humor.

Ostrich is a very lean meat. Bison is a very lean meat. Chicken is a very lean meat. Notice something about my favorite meats?

The energy you give off is the energy you receive. I really think that, so I'm always myself - JUMPING, dancing, singing around, trying to cheer everybody up.

Oh it's fantastic because I get to whip people like David into shape and tell them to go get me coffee. Kidding - okay.

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

I felt all the ways in which this world seemed so, so enormous--the height of the trees, the hush and tick of the forest, the shift of the sunlight and shadows--but also so, so removed.

We are only as great as our struggles. We only become who we are in the face of them.

Climate change is also clearly a matter of huge interest and concern for the scientific community.

Dying is something you have no control over. Why waste your life being afraid of it?