Sometimes people won't even finish a piece that you wrote, because they've already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I'm going to end up with, but they don't finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.

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.

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

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

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.

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.