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

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.

There are a lot of things I want, " I say quietly and deliberately. "But I think I will keep what I have.

human beings are human beings, just treat everyone like that.

There's no use fussing on a boy who doesn't have any ability.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers.

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.

Did you ever drink so much of a certain type of alcohol that you get so sick that you can never drink the same kind again ? I've decided that's how I'm going to quit drinking. One-at-a-time.

The young mind is pliable and imitates, but in more advanced states grows rigid and must be warmed and softened before it will receive a deep impression.

And not only my own brothers and sisters agreed so but my brothers and sisters in law; and their children, although but young, had the like agreeable natures and affectionate dispositions.

It's interesting when you're trying to create a character in animation. It's really a communal effort.

There is one fundamental message that we want to go out from this place to every nook and cranny of our country: There should be no new tax collection without an election.