Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.

Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.

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.

Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.

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.

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 don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.