There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

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.

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.

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

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.

You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.