“Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

You,” Said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.

It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.

I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!

It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature’s hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God’s marvelous firmament!

There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

The leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

So he can add his voice to the chorus of others whether it’s gay activists or now a New Testament professor.

Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.

I’m not a plumber who accidentally blew up or a math professor who accidentally backed into notoriety.

There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago.