“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.” IfsRealityStaircasesSlinkies Author:Louis Menand
“It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.” IfsKnowsHardReader Author:Louis Menand
“Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is you want bright undergraduates to look at your profession as something they would be interested in getting into.” IfsWantLooksWould BeDoctorsProfessionWhat You WantLawyer Author:Louis Menand
“It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.” PeopleIfsThinkingWayGivingDoeSchoolJobsDifficultInterestTeachingStudentsDegreesLaborInstitutionsStartingGraduatesEmployedAssistantsInstructorsGraduate StudentsCheap LaborStay In School Author:Louis Menand
“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.” PeopleIfsWritingSaidIdeasDifferentNumbersFairsResponseDifferent IdeasOddities Author:Louis Menand
“If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.” PeopleIfsKnowsWritingKindReaderGrammarNew Yorkers Author:Louis Menand
“I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.” IfsThinkingLiteratureFunFieldsHaving FunNo PointEnglish Literature Author:Louis Menand
