A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.

Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.