It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

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.

People strive to be ahead of time just to get a chance to trip it.

A man who can make love with another man can also make love with the enemy.

The storm is here and now. The rains come and water floods our lives. Nothing last forever and the rainbow always appears.

I have always been a firm believer in working hard for what is right and for making your own breaks if you want things to change.

I think in between where you are and where you want to be is a sea of reasons why you can't get there.

A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. .. When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim towards reproduction.

I put a mustache and some eyebrows on, and I looked just like Nicolas Cage. ... We have the same amazingly handsome good looks.

Photography [can] be seen as a system of representation that you bring to bear on other systems.

Momma, you're special," Renesmee told me without any surprise, like she was commenting on the color of my clothes.