“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.” PeopleThinkingFeelsHelpingJobsAgendas Author:Louis Menand
“I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.” PeopleThinkingBelieveMatterAppreciateTheodore Author:Louis Menand
“The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.” PeopleKnowsWellsKindHas BeensMightJobsNumbersMoralRolesHugeCriticsEducatedMight Have Been1960sArbiterHuge Numbers Author:Louis Menand
“I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.” PeopleThinkingArtLiteratureSensibility Author:Louis Menand
“Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and '60's. So that represents a whole new literate public that's a consumer of literature, of news, of print, of, you know, opinion. And that's a bigger audience and much more diverse audience than it used to be.” PeopleKnowsWholeUsedLiteratureOpinionAudienceCollegeAmountHigherNewsBiggerEnormousUsed To BeConsumersPrintDiverseHigher Education Author:Louis Menand
“Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.” PeopleTogetherUniversityWorking TogetherDisagree Author:Louis Menand
“I do worry a lot about the time it takes for people to get a PhD, about the difficulty of finding employment, about the difficulty of getting tenure, and generally about the perception that undergraduates have, that this is a very high-risk career to get started.” PeopleCareersWorryRiskFindingsPerceptionDifficultyEmploymentTenurePhdsHigh Risk Author:Louis Menand
“It's generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest that professors are going to be more liberal than the general public.” PeopleEducatedProfessorsGeneral Public 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
“Sometimes people won't even finish a piece that you wrote, because they've already decided what it is that you want to say, and generally I, whatever I say in the first half of the piece, you should not assume I'm going to end up with, but they don't finish reading them. So, and people read fast and stuff.” PeopleWantShouldFirstsEndsSometimesReadingStuffHalfPiecesDecidedAssuming 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'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.” PeopleWayWritingKindDifferentMatterSeemsCertainAudienceIntellectualNo Matter WhatDifferent WaysHatsAcademicDifferent KindsScholarlyReadership Author:Louis Menand
“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.” PeopleRealityCultureAcceptingGainsVersions Author:Louis Menand
