 If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. |
| When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas. |
| Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading. |
| The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives. |
| It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable. |
| We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. |
| If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false. |
| Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions. |
| When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect. |
| The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves. |
| We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. |
| John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student. |
