One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

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.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

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.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

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.

I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

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

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually places where you get killed.

To believe in Jesus Christ is to be saved from death to life eternal.

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

I would sooner pluck one single brand from the burning than explain all mysteries.

Men fear to lose as much as they hope to gain.

You should listen to a lot of different music.

As Android, iPhone and other mobile platforms grow, we are moving away from the page-based Internet. The new Internet is app centric and often message-centric.

The biggest waste of water in the country by far. You spend half a pint and flush two gallons.

A visual image is a simple thing, a picture that enters the eyes.

I am at that age when you panic at the slightest thing.