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.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.

The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.

It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.

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