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

I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.

It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.