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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

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Louis Menand
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 21
Academic
Historian
Writer
Syracuse
New York
Think
Henry
Thinking
James
People
Matters
Appreciate
Whether
Matter
Believe
Really
Theodore

More quotes by Louis Menand

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One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
Louis Menand
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Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management, leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets.
Louis Menand
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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
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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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It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are. Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.
Louis Menand
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.
Louis Menand
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You want diversity in any intellectual organization. I mean, that's how good ideas arise.
Louis Menand
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I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.
Louis Menand
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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
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Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.
Louis Menand
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I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.
Louis Menand
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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
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I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.
Louis Menand
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Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and '60's. So that represents a whole new literate public that's a consumer of literature, of news, of print, of, you know, opinion. And that's a bigger audience and much more diverse audience than it used to be.
Louis Menand
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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
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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