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.

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.

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.

If you are living an original life, there is absolutely no need to compete with anyone else.

This is a chance for me to listen and learn. There's no more important and rewarding part of my job.

The old know what they want the young are sad and bewildered.

If I'm alone in the car and I fart, I still laugh at it. It's the little things that keep us civilised.

It's good to leave your room super-messy when you're away. Whoever tries to break into your room will thought it has already been ransacked.

Being responsible and taking care of your body is truly how you make your pay cheque, how you excel and succeed in your lifelong goals, so for me it's just an everyday lifestyle.

You see but your shadow when you turn your back to the sun.

Unruly ambition is deaf, not only to the advice of friends, but to the counsels and monitions of reason itself.

Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet