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.

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 that taste should be the decider of moral issues.

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

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

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.