Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

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.

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.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Our perception is our window to the world, and we need to wipe the dust off of our window often so we can continue to see through it clearly.

I saw with my eyes people with and without purpose, people with the purpose know where they are going and the others follow the flow!?

Running for President is physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually the most demanding single undertaking I can envisage unless it's World War III.

I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this his almost chosen people.

The beautiful always retains the freshness of novelty, while the astonishing soon grow tiresome.

We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.

I'm so not a party person. I'm so not social and don't go to parties.

Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow.

I am not a federal employee. I am a constitutional officer. My job is the Constitution of the United States, I am not a government employee. I am in the Constitution.