Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

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.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.

They say that maths is a language. So how do I order a pizza with extra cheese in maths?

Make up for every mistake you make in life. Some of us humans tend to learn from our mistakes and others tend to make the same false mistakes." ― Sage Canny

We are creatures on this planet that have the capacity of self-awareness, playing out our role just the same as all else.

There is nothing more dangerous than to leap a chasm in two jumps.

There is no ceasefire. There will not be any ceasefire.

Treat [Williams] and I have remained sort of like war buddies. He's a good guy. It doesn't matter who is the wingman, you just know that you work good together.

We regret mistakes were made.

Books + friendship = book club

Here is a piece of earth. If you stand staring at it and doing nothing, what does the earth yield? Nothing. Just like a woman.

I love interaction with audiences. If were my choice, I would spend most of my time interacting with audiences. Walking around and asking them to challenge me.