Only in the fact that I was kind of a science wonk in the '50s. You know, won a lot of science...
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.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
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...
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.
The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing-by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.
Rap is far from an abstract, dematerialized mode of utterance. I hate a lot of rap because it's bad stuff, but it does emphasize the articulatory aspect of the words.
Natural Supernaturalism is quite well known and even used as a textbook, but it never seems to have attracted the acclaim of its predecessor.
Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
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.
I've always been surprised at the degree of success of The Mirror and the Lamp and duration of esteem for it. I had no reason to expect in 1953 that it would appeal to more than a specialized group...
Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.