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.

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

Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.

Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.

Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.

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.

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.