The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.

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.

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.

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 think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.

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.