I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.

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

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.

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.