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.

My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.

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.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.