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.

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.

When I was young, I went to college, had a teacher who was, had been a student of Trilling's at Columbia, this was in California. And he, I started reading him around that time, and then I went to Columbia as well, Trilling was still teaching there, I took a course with him. He was not a great teacher, but he was, when I was younger, he was a good model for the kind of criticism I wanted to do, because he thought very dialectically.

I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.

You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.

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.

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.