In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

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.

Men die in battle women die in childbirth.

War takes so many more casualties than just the dead.

Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things our own meditation must form our judgement.

If one artist sells five million albums, the tendency is for other artists to say, 'Maybe I should do a little of that, too.' That can be tough to resist.

Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd.

Teach one girl how to code, she'll teach four. The replication effect is so powerful.

Softly drops the crimson sun: Softly down from overhead, Drop the bell-notes, one by one, Melting in the melting red.

We have a President, perhaps for the very first time since the founding of our republic, who doesn't appear to believe that America is the greatest earthly force for good the world has ever known.

I believe in myself and in Saint Therese.

The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.