"Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."
— Werner Herzog

"Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end."
— Stephen King

"Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research."
— Brian Eno

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure."
— Daniel C. Dennett

"The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"Globalization is not just about changing relations between the ‘inside’ of the nation-state and the ‘outside’ of the international system. It cuts across received categories, creating myriad multilayered intersections, overlapping playing fields, and actors skilled at working across these boundaries. People are at once rooted and rootless, local producers and global consumers, threatened in their identities yet continually remaking those identities."
— Philip G. Cerny

"A Ph.D., I was happy to discover, was a convenient shelter for the alien who knew not the ropes of living in the new country, providing him a world within a world in which to function, to be acceptably eccentric."
— M. G. Vassanji

"Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill."
— Stephen Graham