Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

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.

If a guy can't even handle my words, I don't think he can handle me as a person.

Saying of the ProphetPracticeWho are the learned? Those who put into practice what they know.

Can a growing human population still leave space for wildlife?

Playboy isn't like the downscale, male bonding, beer-swilling phenomena that is being promoted now by (some men's magazines). My whole notion was the romantic connection between male and female.

It’s been the structure of my life: you scheme and plan and try and fail and try again and accumulate and lose and win back, and then you tell.

I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty.

Behind every piece of bad content is an executive who asked for it.

Class isn't something you buy. Look at you ... you've got on a $500 suit and you're still a low life.

No matter where you go, poor people have the capacity to endure. Some people even compliment us on it, as if endurance is all we can achieve.