"[Johns] Hopkins had this very postmodernist slant. You couldn't help but be really influenced by this emphasis on the text, on experimental texts. People were fascinated with Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth was there, and the focus was on that, which I found very helpful."

"I got a lot of encouragement there from John Barth, a genius, a superb teacher"

"[T]o a greater or lesser extent our knowledge even of close kin is often fragmentary, inferred like a fossil skeleton or an ancient vase from whatever always-limited experience and shards of memory we have of them."

"The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, … it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study."

"So what's to be said … for a curriculum devoted to a study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of "the best that has been thought and said," in Matthew Arnold's famous formulation — or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?Well: what's to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs — any good old curriculum does that — but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season's pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students."

"'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer."

"More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations."

"[I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him."

"[T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act."

"[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people."

"One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way."

"Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — she'd been reading up on reciprocal atrocities in the Guerra Civil — that the sunny Spanish could never be guilty of an Auschwitz, for example. In the first place, your ovens would have died, like our kitchen stove, instead of your Jews, whom you'd got rid of anyhow in the sunny Fifteenth century, no? And in the second place the whole idea of extermination camps would've been too impersonal for your exquisite Moorish tastes. Much more agradable to push folks off a cliff one at a time into a gorgeous Mediterranean sunset, as you did near Malaga — three hundred, was it, or three thousand? Or to rape and then kill a convent-full of nuns in the manner of the saint of their choice — was that Barcelona or Valencia?"

"The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did."

"The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way."

"I hope my studies may be an encouragement to other women, especially to young women, to devote their lives to the larger interests of the mind. It matters little whether men or women have the more brains; all we women need to do to exert our proper influence is just to use all the brains we have."

"Great care has gone into the construction of the shadow which declares itself to be Richard Nixon."

"If you talk to gangsters long enough, you’ll find out they’re just as bad as respectable people."

"In baseball, the true class enemy is not the boss, but the fan."

"Donald Trump dresses his hatred up as though it were a peacock's feathers. In any polity entitled to think itself civilized, persons with regard for their breeding would leave the room politely but definitely whenever Donald Trump entered it."

"For touching a people who want to forget ugly problems, no politician equals the one who has already forgotten them himself."

"One does not attend this movie; one enlists in it."

"The faces in New York remind me of people who had played a game and lost."