Academic Constraints Quotes

Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons.

I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

I went to McGill University, but I didn't graduate. They won't graduate me because I didn't have a degree in any one thing. I studied everything and they were like, "You studied too many things, so we can't give you a degree."

Only the schools’ inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25.

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.

The university has become so stultified since the sixties. There is so much you can't do at the university. You can't say this, you can't do that, you can't think this, and so forth. In many ways, I'm free to range as widely as I do intellectually precisely because I'm not at a university. The tiresome Chicanos would be after me all the time. You know: "We saw your piece yesterday, and we didn't like what you said," or, "You didn't sound happy enough," or, "You didn't sound proud enough."

I don't want to write a mass before being in a state to do it well, that is a Christian. I have therefore taken a singular course to reconcile my ideas with the exigencies of Academy rules. They ask me for something religious: very well, I shall do something religious, but of the pagan religion. . . . I have always read the ancient pagans with infinite pleasure, while in Christian writers I find only system, egoism, intolerance, and a complete lack of artistic taste.

I'm really a very weak musicologist. Wish it weren't so, but there's only so much you can dig deeply into in one lifetime, as if you hadn't noticed.

I don't know much, but nor do I have the intellectual straitjacket that a lot of people inevitably pick up at university.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

I couldn't find a way to write music with numbers and rules and schedules. So I tried to forget the academic idea of music and started to see if it was possible to do creative work, taking in all the influences I wanted to keep.

There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.

I wasn't interested in sport or anything obvious, so I didn't stand out. I was interested in music, but I couldn't read music, so I wasn't allowed to do the GCSE. I was interested in painting, but no one's interested in a 16-year-old boy who's interested in painting. I wanted to get out of school very, very quickly.