Quotes from James Hynes

A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The Midwesterner's credo: keep it to yourself.

Plotting is an organic, and wildly inefficient process of trial and error.

Indeed, it was not unusual for the dais to be littered with panties and boxer shorts after one of Branwell's talks at the MLA.

An advertising man understands even more viscerally than an academic that the world is made of discourse, Pescecane argued; he understands in his bones that true power resides in the infinite manipulability of signs.

I live in a library now, surrounded by the greatest works of literature in the world, but I'm here to tell you, reader, literature is not the foundation of civilization. The foundation of civilization is hot water. Civilization is plumbing.

This is the greatest mystery of all: even a bird can be a slave, but even in its cage, it sings.