"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."

“When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that.”

“John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. I like to read Archie Ammons, my great friend. And Harold Bloom, another former student.”

“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.”

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

“I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.”