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 that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.

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.

One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.

You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.

The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.

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.