At the end of the day, I'm a very boring academic, bogged down with academia and structure and delivering an education.
Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.
When I was in my 20s, I was a bookworm - spent 12 hours of the day in the library. How I met George, I'll never know.
I love college life.
To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.
People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.
That's what university life is all about. Challenging, questioning, enjoying good people and good friends, and pushing yourself to the limit.
That's one of those things about being a computer science major: Valentine's Day is just another day.
When I was in high school and college, my other real focus was, actually, fiction writing. So in college, I had done all these seminars with these various writers-in-residence.
While I had been, I guess, quite brilliant, academically, in my college years, I also had been editor of the paper, and I loved that. And, that was a much more active thing. And I missed it when I was doing graduate work.
I have a passion for academic life, a passion for students and for the ability and the narrative of a university to make a difference in the world in which they reside.
It was in the beginning of the month of November, 17--, when a young English gentleman, who had just left the university of Oxford, made use of the liberty afforded him, to visit some parts of the north of England; and curiosity extended his tour into the adjacent frontier of the sister country.
I spent a lot of time in college. I was just being academic and discovering myself through reason and analysis.
Both my wife and I went to Harvard, and it's incredibly exciting that our son and daughter are going there and have the chance to experience it. There are many awesome opportunities at Harvard. That's one of its greatest frustrations - not having enough time to take the classes you want to take.
I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.
I feel that very strongly: having been an academic, having been tempted by the invitation to stay on to become a Ph.D., a professor, and all that, one side of me certainly does respect all disciplines, as long as they don't ossify.
If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means -- from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.
In many ways, I was a typical young guy out of college. I was at Oxford, where every night there'd be a late showing of some great film.
I'm an academic. I teach at the university, and that's where I will go back to.
In college, you're kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.
From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.
Heaven, they say, protects children, sailors, and drunken men; and whatever answers to Heaven in the academical system protects freshmen.
Sometimes I do wonder what college would have been like. But I made my decision.
Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
