What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

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.

Simplicity is the ultimate beauty of life.

Love brought its tail of pains, its long static beam of thorns, and we close our eyes so that nothing, so that no wound will separate us.

Let us walk in the path of light

We die as often as we lose a friend.

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.

I've got lots of weird illustrations of me from Japanese fans.

Can a wolfe be beautiful?

Then I did Mystic Pizza, just to do something I wasn't fat in.