College Quotes

This part for “General Hospital” came up, and I only took it because I needed the money. I didn’t think it was any kind of career move… I thought, “Nobody watches these shows except blue-haired old ladies ironing.” But it just happened to become the popular TV show among college kids that summer. It was […]

I think I had spent up my available capital for extroversion in college, and I had to be by myself. I intended to take one year, but ended up taking four.

My father, who was technically an immigrant—he came when he was an infant—wanted me to be an American, preferably an American president. He didn’t go to college. Before I was born he wanted me to go specifically to Yale, which he thought would help. It was easy for him to think I could be president: […]

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn’t be playing football.

My roommate in college in Austin, Texas, was Wes Anderson. Wes always wanted to be a director. I was an English major in college, and he got us to work on a screenplay together. And then, in working on the screenplay, he wanted my brother, Luke, and me to act in this thing. We did […]

I learned a lot in college, the very least of it in the classrooms. I learned how to kiss a girl and put on a rubber at the same time (a necessary but often overlooked skill), how to chug a sixteen-ounce can of beer without throwing up, how to make extra cash in my spare […]

The old college is no doubt gone and we could not bring it back if we would. But it would perhaps be well for us if we could keep alive something of the intimate and friendly spirit that inspired it.

Colleges don’t make fools, they only develop them.

I approached the idea of college with the expectation of taking part in an intellectual feast… In college, in some way that I devoutly believed in but could not explain, I expected to become a person.

(Mencken is reviewing the essays which were submitted to the Mercury’s college competition.) The student body, seen through the eyes of the essayists, came out almost as badly as the faculty. Life at an American college has plainly become more or less uncomfortable to a young man or woman of active and eager mind… What […]