To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.

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.

There are no quick fixes in your life. If you want to live a happier life you have to make your actions happier every day. You need to be determined to make your life better if you want it to be so.

Who better than Wal-Mart, after all, to make a kilowatt of electricity go twice as far, or a gallon of fuel move our trucks move three times the distance?" -Wal-Mart ad

How can you be in love with someone for forever and not be willing to take a chance when it finally hits you in the face like a linebacker?

Those who have the most wealth and the most property, their children have the first, the best, and the most.

It is not wise for Chinese to do things to artificially disrupt relations with the U.S.

It has been demonstrated that no system, not even the most inhuman, can continue to exist without an ideology.

If we couldn't carry our dead inside us, we would be empty.

And only the sure of foot can give a hand to him who stumbles.

Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been.

‎What is to prevent, say, an uprising?