“I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible. ”

“What do you have in mind after you graduate?"What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue."I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

“Are there really other things in life besides music? - Avery Jones in Love Evolution”

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”

“Alexis grabbed his arm. "Tom Jones? Wow, I totally love Tom Jones. He's like quintessential Vegas—over the top and indecent fun. Let me just go grab a pair of underwear to throw at him and we'll be all set."Over his undead body. If anyone was getting her underwear tossed in his face, it was going to be him."I don't think so, Ball Buster. You're not giving your panties to an old man.""Oh, and you're so young, Garlic?""Garlic?" What the hell was that?"Yep. Now we have pet names for each other, isn't that adorable? You're Garlic and I'm Ball Buster. Now everyone will believe we're a real couple.”

“Blifil's failure as a character in "Tom Jones" is ultimately due to the fact that he has absolutely no redeeming characteristics and once his base nature has been discovered by the reader there is nothing further to know about hi,”