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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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