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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

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.