No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

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 object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

As any distance we take from things give us an outside perspective, so does taking a geographical distance—offering us a new vantage point over our lives.

it felt like waking up over and over without falling sleep in between.

We need to and must protect privacy. But I think that people will be willing and even eager to share medical information about themselves for the greater good of mankind.

You are one of a kind, one in a billion, an incredible unique individual. The problem is, so is everybody else.

I like Stevie Wonder. I usually wind up playing the same old tapes in the car.

The footprint of the savage traced in the sand is sufficient to attest the presence of man to the atheist who will not recognize God, whose hand is impressed upon the entire universe.

I can't believe a guy that handsome wouldn't have some impact.

I know the drill. [Republicans] say Donald Trump is not a Republican. They say he's a Trojan horse or he's unacceptable or he's uncouth or whatever they say.

You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.