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.

It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.

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.