I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

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.

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.

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.

Laurel, David? Would you like to share the joke with the rest of the class?" he asked, one hand on his skinny hip.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive? I don't know. I'm already tired.

I was an excellent student before I left school. But I graduated early so that I could work longer hours on '90210.

How we start our day is often how we live our lives

Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation, and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son, lynched?

The merit claimed for the Anglican Church is that, if you let it alone, it will let you alone.

If you start embracing life's storms instead of hiding away from them, you'll stop fearing them all together; it is this way one becomes immovable.

He that has done nothing has known nothing.

The more you gripe about your problems, the more problems you have to gripe about!