Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.

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.

I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.

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

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

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.