Top 35 Louis Menand Quotes
#1. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.
Louis Menand
#2. 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.
Louis Menand
#3. A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.
Louis Menand
#4. 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.
Louis Menand
#5. I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.
Louis Menand
#6. The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.
Louis Menand
#7. 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.
Louis Menand
#8. For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.
Louis Menand
#9. I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.
Louis Menand
#10. There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.
Louis Menand
#11. Diminished circumstances had no effect on his sense of what was honorable: after The Spectator sent him a check for a piece it had accepted but was unable to run for a lack of space, he refused to write for the magazine again.
Louis Menand
#12. Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.
Louis Menand
#13. One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.
Louis Menand
#14. If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky.
Louis Menand
#15. It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.
Louis Menand
#16. The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in education.
Louis Menand
#17. They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools - like forks and knives and microchips - that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.
Louis Menand
#18. 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.
Louis Menand
#19. My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.
Louis Menand
#20. Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.
Louis Menand
#21. One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.
Louis Menand
#22. 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.
Louis Menand
#23. Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.
Louis Menand
#24. I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.
Louis Menand
#25. If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary.
Louis Menand
#26. 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.
Louis Menand
#27. 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.
Louis Menand
#29. The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.
Louis Menand
#30. Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.
Louis Menand
#31. I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.
Louis Menand
#32. Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.
Louis Menand
#33. 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.
Louis Menand
#34. I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.
Louis Menand
#35. You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.
Louis Menand
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