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.

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.

A week ago, he would’ve sank his fangs into her flesh without a second thought. But now? Muriah had lured him into her world, into her reality, not as a god, but as a partner, a man.

When men are arrested without any legal basis and for political reasons, it's merely a routine, everyday occurrence in Russia, and hardly anyone has any sympathy.

Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.

I guess babysitters are like used cars... You never really know what you're getting.

It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.

I can't understand why I flunked American history. When I was a kid there was so little of it.

The better you are at surrounding yourself with people of high potential, the greater your chance for success.

I've found the best thing to do is to really be loving, kind, forgiving and compassionate with yourself. There are some wonderful practices for that which I talk about in Love For No Reason.

Music is the celestial sound, and it is sound that controls the whole universe, not atomic vibrations. Sound energy, sound power, is much, much greater than any other power in the world.

I think back a little bit when President Bush was elected President and what kind of economy he inherited from the Clinton administration. The economy was going down. It was not doing well.