To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; but the purchase of books is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents.
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.
If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
I'd be at someone's house or be up on the roof all day and I'd get lonely - stir crazy - and talk radio became this soothing voice in my life. But the idea that I was making $10 an hour and stacking drywall while these guys were making a few hundred thousand, and they were having a party, and there were Playmates and there were good times, I just couldn't imagine it.