Shakespeare Is Universal.

I Realized Early On That The Academy And The Literary World Alike

The Art And Passion Of Reading Well And Deeply Is Waning, But [jane] Austen Still Inspires People To Become Fanatical Readers.

I Am Not Unique In My Elegiac Sadness At Watching Reading Die, In The Era That Celebrates Stephen King And J.k. Rowling Rather Than Charles Dickens And Lewis Carroll.

What Is Supposed To Be The Very Essence Of Judaism - Which Is The Notion That It Is By Study That You Make Yourself A Holy People - Is Nowhere Present In Hebrew Tradition Before The End Of The First Or The Beginning Of The Second Century Of The Common Era.

Reading The Very Best Writers—let Us Say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is Not Going To Make Us Better Citizens. Art Is Perfectly Useless, According To The Sublime Oscar Wilde, Who Was Right About Everything. He Also Told Us That All Bad Poetry Is Sincere. Had I The Power To Do So, I Would Command That These Words Be Engraved Above Every Gate At Every University, So That Each Student Might Ponder The Splendor Of The Insight.