Quotes from Jay Parini

As 'Possession' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges.

Good and productive labor is valuable, and it doesn't mean you have to have a fancy job description. You don't have to become rich. You can be ordinary. Happiness lies there. Do good work, create good work for others.

I think the membrane - I say that the membrane between life and death is perilously thin. And I do think the story of Jesus, this great mythical story, can have transforming value in our lives.

We are a nation of immigrants, a quilt of many colors, and we've managed over more than two centuries to create a way of life that allows for a reasonable degree of upward mobility, that prizes individual liberty, promotes freedom of religion and genuinely values equal rights for all citizens.

American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.

'Of Mice and Men,' Steinbeck's fifth novel, adheres to a simple dramatic structure, which observes the classic Aristotelian unities of time, place and action.

The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.

God is God, but he has various names in different languages, and each strand of monotheistic religion has multiple ways of describing the godhead.

My father was a Baptist preacher, and he used to read the King James Bible to me every single morning. He made me memorize it and repeat verses at night before I went to sleep.

Then I studied theology in college, and when I was getting a Ph.D. in literature, I took courses in New Testament studies and studied Greek versions of the Gospels.

The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

I had a year off, so my wife and I were heading to Italy to study Italian. We found a little house in a village called Atrani. I discovered that Gore Vidal lived right above us in a big house, so I sent him a note.

I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.