Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

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.

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

By the way, dancers are not human beings. How can you be human and do what they do?

I've had two unlucky injuries that are the equivalent of walking under 1,000 ladders and seeing 1,000 black cats.

To re-embrace what I once loved about music has been a warming process for me, because it's a good, earned feeling now.

My favorite party trick is to wear nothing but a gold thong in the house.

The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks' comment on married life.

The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company

Everyone worships something. The only choice you get is what to worship.

Whenever there's a change with Jazz & its aesthetics, it's almost always reflected with a change in the culture.