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.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

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.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better - can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes.