Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

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.

Trusting yourself means you dare walk alone.

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Wiseman participates, others are just observers

All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story.

Precious gems are profoundly buried in the earth and can only be extracted at the expense of great labor.

The thing I fear comes upon me

Even if you don't believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Every time I hit a shot, I feel like I am shaking hands with the flag stick.

Ah! how annoying that the law doesn't allow a woman to change husbands just as one does shirts.

I know that I don't have a perfect performance that I bring to set. I bring ideas to set, and I'm more than willing for those to be affected and be malleable, based on what the other person gives me.