I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.

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.

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

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

Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is you want bright undergraduates to look at your profession as something they would be interested in getting into.

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'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.