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- Poetry is rhetoric without the power to change anything. The purity of poetry comes from its powerlessness.
- The cliche of the English teacher who changes their students’ lives with a poem is rooted in a very essential truth: that poetry uproots us from the soil of power, and lifts us into the sunlight.
- In giving every student in the nation’s schools a laptop, we might as well be giving them a ball and chain.
- I’m always vaguely disturbed when we praise Hollywood blockbusters for furthering the cause of social justice. There are too many contradictions to even list them here.
- Try to think of a political system that wouldn’t require prisons — then you’re really doing political philosophy.
- The best, most published, most important young scholar I know can’t get a tenure-track job because he writes about Henry James and doesn’t use bullshit jargon.
- I think James Joyce would have trouble getting into the top creative writing MFAs.
- People just simply don’t have bookshelves in their homes, and if they do, they don’t have books on them. In serious ways, the American middle-class is significantly dumber than it was a hundred years ago.
- Phones are a cognitive impairment.
