Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

Henry Louis Gates is such a wealth of knowledge in himself.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

I was an English major in college!

I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes.

I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.

I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'

I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.

My master's degree was in English literature.

I think you need brains to do any Shakespeare with any authority. I could do Shakespeare, but not with any authority.

The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.

At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

I grew up reading a lot on literature and all of that.

From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.