We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

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.

The goal is to move the thinking that we do every day to the feeling that we often ignore and don't pay attention to.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

Don't listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions.

While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances.

What can I say about Brian Williams. Nothing, because I work for NBC.

Satyagraha is a process of educating public opinion, such that it covers all the elements of the society and in the end makes itself irresistible.

The purpose of art actually is, in many cases, to make you feel quite uncomfortable. Or at least to go to that place that's already of discomfort inside of you and tap into that.

It looks like a miniature hippopotamus with badly-fitting panty hose all over.

I assume then, that you have no real faith in the fondness any of the rest of us may feel for you?''None,' said Mrs. Halloran.

Actually, I began to think that maybe there is a god, after all. Or maybe its a different one. The old one got fired.