If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.

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

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

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.

Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and '60's. So that represents a whole new literate public that's a consumer of literature, of news, of print, of, you know, opinion. And that's a bigger audience and much more diverse audience than it used to be.

It's generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest that professors are going to be more liberal than the general public.

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