Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

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.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.

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 at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.