Quotes About M.F.A.

I got an M.F.A. in acting from NYU, and part of our training is to learn how to use swords in combat situations in a performance and Shakespeare plays where you have to fight.

I teach in M.F.A. programs now, and I think that's a great way to become a novelist, but I mourn that Pete Dexter and Joan Didion's route is maybe less likely because there are fewer of those jobs. I always liken it to playing piano in some great dive jazz bar. You didn't pick the songs, you played what people asked for, but you got your chops.

Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

The teacher knows that for the vast majority of her charges the M.F.A. will not in fact function as a professional degree leading to a job but rather as a costly extension of their liberal education.