You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.

I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.

The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ...at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically.

I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.