But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

Wieseltier appeared in one episode of the fifth season of The Sopranos playing "Stuart Silverman" a character whom Wieseltier described as "a derangingly materialistic co-religionist who dreams frantically of 'Wedding of the Week' and waits a whole year for some stupid car in which he can idle for endless hours in traffic east of Quogue every weekend of every summer the vulgar Zegna-swaddled brother of a Goldman Sachs mandarin whose son's siman tov u'mazel tov is provided by a pulchritudinous and racially diverse bunch of Leon Wieseltierllfish-eating chicks in tight off-the-shoulder gowns. Against Identity is a collection of thoughts about the modern notion of identity. During Wieseltier's tenure as literary editor of The New Republic many of his signed and unsigned writings have appeared in the magazine.

Since 1983 he has been the literary editor of The New Republic.