«I think for both of us it's important to reveal something of ourselves and our own commitment to it. I sometimes talk about my family in the course, my wife and my children, and that's because this kind of work crosses a divide between personal and professional.»

«One of the astonishing realizations that I never expected was the feeling that students could take away a great deal from notoriously difficult literature. 'The Waste Land' is the great example for me, because it's a work of such legendary difficulty, and again and again I have students come in and say they loved it, they dressed up as 'The Waste Land' for Halloween, they keep reading it. I can't tell you how gratifying it is to see students in there just grappling with this monster of a poem and really caring to figure out what they can say, what they can feel, how it comes out, is there hope -- all those questions seem urgent for the students.»

«At one point in this course or another, if you can't find a book that you will care about forever, then you're not fully alive -- so get fully alive. We need to be a more thoughtful culture, but we also need to be a more emotionally expressive culture. A lot of what motivates the two of us, I know it motivates me, is just this idea that the power of precise thinking goes along with the power of deep feeling.»