In the fourth grade my history teacher gave us a project: Why was the auto industry located in Detroit Michigan? I didn't know I was going to be an economist but I knew I was going to do something that was involved in answering questions like that one because I thought that was a fascinating question.

The second and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic a scholar a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way actually. That was a very subversive activity because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher people loved it.

I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature I just wanted to do something else.

I must have got my detailed obsessive streak from my father who was an English teacher because my mother wasn't like me at all.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black woman mother dyke teacher etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

I'm embarrassed every time I look a teacher in the eye because we ask them to do so much for so little.

I never had to learn English French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent a teacher an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

More negatives write than call. It's a cheap shot for me to go on the air with the critical letters or E-mail I get because the reaction of the listeners is always an instantaneous expression of sympathy for me and contempt for the poor critic.