I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

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.

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.

Guns are like men—only useful for a little while. They can go off at a moment's notice when you don't want them to and they make a lot of damn fool noise doing it.

Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough.

True prayer always receives what it asks for-or something better.

I think, in a lot of ways, celebrities represent the American dream. They have financial fluidity and options at their disposal.

I used to think JESUS motivated us with ultimatums, but now I know He pursues us in LOVE.

The Republican party does have a lot of work to do. But changing our principles is not a winning strategy. We need to modernize, not moderate.

I don't know what happens when you die. I've never been dead. I'm just interested.

It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.