Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.

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.

Person-centred counselling may be thought of as 'not enough'. In my experience it is. It allows for self-determination through an acknowledgement of a person's human rights.

Lack of pep is often mistaken for patience.

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

The new Republican Congress should move full speed ahead to repeal and replace Obamacare. It would be unwise to wait for the Supreme Court to perform this service for the American people.

Maybe if you stopped asking "why" all the time, you might be happy. Leave it alone, you know? Life is happy.

If I do my full duty, the rest will take care of itself.

The Jewish community is all about love and family, which is the most important thing in my life, too.

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

My ceiling's broken, my car's got a puncture and we've just lost two matches. But I've got my health and I'll ask the big man upstairs why he didn't give us a point.

I go back to December, turn around and make it alright I go back to December, turn around and change my own mind I go back to December all the time