[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.

When anything goes, it's women who lose.

[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies.

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.

Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space.

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.