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

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

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.

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

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

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

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 survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

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

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

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

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

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

If Islam's sole interest is the welfare of mankind, then Islam is the strongest advocate of human rights anywhere on Earth.

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll.

You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I'm taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.

We are the Bibles the world is reading we are the creeds the world is needing we are the sermons the world is heeding.

News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.

Everybody loves things that sparkle.

That's what my life is, writing songs.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

You feel different every day of your life. You just have to create your own space to survive, personally and professionally.

I liked 'Diff'rent Strokes' up until about the last three or four years. I was bored.

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

Although they might not admit it, I think girls are very aware of the impact that they're having. But they never feel it themselves, and it's impossible to explain. It's like trying to tell a blind person what yellow is.

There is no advertisement as powerful as a positive reputation traveling fast.

I am broadcaster's biggest cheerleader because I genuinely believe in it. Where else can you get 20 million people a week watching 'NCIS' or 'American Idol?' Where else can you get 120 million watching the Super Bowl?

I reject most conventional wisdom.

Historically, filmmakers always fall in love with every frame, but now that even neophytes are given final cut, this love affair carries with it serious economic implications.

The female body is awesome.

I try to eat fruit and veggies and meat and all the different categories and have a well rounded diet.

How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.

Never again should Ghanaians have to resort to dubious means to get to, or live in, foreign lands, simply to make a living.

Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.