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.

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.

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.

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.

Gods, man, don't you start now, ' I said softly. 'We're going to get a terrible reputation if we just keep travelling across the countryside crying all the time.

The materials of city planning are sky space trees steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy.

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.

We're not a homogeneous party, anymore than the Republicans are. But we are a party that I think has a plan to take us forward.

You can only get discipline in the mass by discipline in the individual.

The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making.

Personally, I think knees should be kept for the eighth or ninth date, or the wedding day. As a nice surprise you know? 'oh, my darling, you have knees! I never would have thought

There you see Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson closing a deal with [Vladimir] Putin in 2011. Two years later, he received one of Russia's highest civilian honors, the Order of Friendship.

Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.

Every something is an echo of nothing