John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
M. H. Abrams

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
M. H. Abrams

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.
M. H. Abrams

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
M. H. Abrams

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
M. H. Abrams

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
M. H. Abrams

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 superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.
M. H. Abrams

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
M. H. Abrams