What all good teachers have in common, however, is that they set high standards for their students and do not settle for anything less.
No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmasriddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
Shakespeare is universal.
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.
If I didn't do well at Wimbledon maybe Chinese people will forget about me.
David and Charles Koch are pretty much as far right as you can get on the ideological spectrum without falling off. They are far right libertarians, very anti-government, very pro-business, very anti-tax, anti-regulatory, in favour of free markets ruling the day.
Light inspires me. I'm drawn to architecture, often graves, statues, trees - things usually that are quite still. I've been taking pictures continuously since 1995 until the end of Polaroid film. I'm taking very few pictures nowadays because I have very little film left, most of it expired.
Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.