If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

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 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.

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

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

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.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.