It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

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

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.

Ambition's ambition is immortality. To create an eternal legacy.

As far as I was concerned, either I was a homosexual or I wasn't, so making films would change nothing.

If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.

People who are very vain are usually equally susceptible; and they who feel one thing acutely, will so feel another.

Once a man ceases to be of service to his neighbor, he begins to be a burden to him.

When the Iron doesn't want to come off the mat, it's the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn't teach you anything.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen.

Sport doesn't know barriers, really. You are judged on your performance... how far you can jump, how fast you can run, how well you can hit a tennis ball.

Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before.

Many men hoard for the future husbands of their wives.