I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.

Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.

Between funny and witty Falls the shadow

There is something in the American project, something in simple American oratory, something in the hope and idealism of this frustrating and contradictory nation that still makes my spirits soar and my heart leap with optimism and belief. If only they understood how to make a cup of tea.

You can never hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip.

This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders.

I'm afraid I don't believe there is such a thing as blasphemy, just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.