A good guitarist will play on one string.
None of us knows who we are.
As we're told that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, and as the PowerPoint throws up aphoristic bromides by the corporate heroes of the digitally driven 'global economy' -- the impl...
Mr. O'Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. "Ms. Auerbach! What will it be today? Camus? Cervantes?" "A...
But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapte...
Look, Mrs. McGillicuddy, it's not my fault your son jumped out a dorm room window on Christmas eve. I've written over fifty books as a Columbia professor, all right? You don't do that by holding hands with every at-risk undergraduate who says he's ho...
Our young people, raised under the old rules of courtesy, never indulged in the present habit of talking incessantly and all at the same time. To do so would have been not only impolite, but foolish; for poise, so much admired as a social grace, coul...
A boy, if he's lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with a self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys unfold in this natural, measured way, ...
Talk helps shape one's thoughts.
To be unable to read was the ultimate measure of wretchedness.
Work is part of school.
The American dream is more about opportunity than anything else.
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
To be honest, it's easier for me to speak with an American accent.
I couldn't achieve the American dream in Japan.
American literature has always been immigrant.
I would lose straight away if I went on 'American Idol.'
On the ground, Pakistan is the most virulently anti-American state on the planet.
American Idol allowed us to find Carrie Underwood.
Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans.
I am proud to be an American Citizen.
