Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is you want bright undergraduates to look at your profession as something they would be interested in getting into.

The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.

I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.

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

Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their careers before can be a rather slow process and a long process, it certainly was the case at Harvard, and it's the case with most of the general education curricula that I know of, it takes four or five years just to get everybody on board with one idea.

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.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.