“I'd like to thank the academy and I'd like to thank my mother and I'd like to thank my mother again, because I forgot to thank her last year.”
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If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.
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There is but one step from the Academy to the Fad.
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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike -- and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two -- are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
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Dawkins'' Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity
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The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house
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The idea that academics should remain ''above the fray'' only gives ideologues license to misuse our work
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In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity - or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity - by being opinionated rather than by being learned
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Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.
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