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.

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.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

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.

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.

The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.