I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.

The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.

I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.

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.

It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.

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.

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.