They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.