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

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.

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.

One can definitely learn a lot of valuable things from successful people, if one isn't too busy envying them.

I don't like to talk about my dreams. I like to make them happen. I prefer to talk about them when they're done.

Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.

I had bags of energy as a kid.

It is enjoyable to make things visible which are invisible.

Faire language grates not the tongue.

I want to be an animated character. I'm also doing more writing and directing.

That wild beast which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.

Evolution is smarter than you are.

There is no sphere of human thought in which it is easier to show superficial cleverness and the appearance of superior wisdom than in discussing questions of currency and exchange