Top 36 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

Menand Quotes #137305
#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

Menand Quotes #209638
#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

Menand Quotes #215927
#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

Menand Quotes #278265
#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

Menand Quotes #293703
#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

Menand Quotes #328664
#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

Menand Quotes #329793
#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

Menand Quotes #355643
#9. I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #372306
#10. There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #414418
#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

Menand Quotes #444595
#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

Menand Quotes #542081
#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

Menand Quotes #593055
#14. If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky.

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #602980
#15. It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #716536
#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

Menand Quotes #763125
#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

Menand Quotes #822835
#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

Menand Quotes #896945
#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

Menand Quotes #1086154
#20. Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #1105818
#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

Menand Quotes #1134381
#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

Menand Quotes #1188450
#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

Menand Quotes #1252150
#24. I detest a man who knows that he knows.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Menand Quotes #1338724
#25. I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #1416695
#26. 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

Menand Quotes #1504026
#27. 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

Menand Quotes #1513721
#28. 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

Menand Quotes #1562442
#29. Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #1592270
#30. 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

Menand Quotes #1632972
#31. 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

Menand Quotes #1666675
#32. 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

Menand Quotes #1671685
#33. 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

Menand Quotes #1710098
#34. 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

Menand Quotes #1715761
#35. I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

Louis Menand

Menand Quotes #1791951
#36. 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

Menand Quotes #1873815

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