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.

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.

It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.

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.

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

The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.

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.