Education Quote by Gay Talese

There is a particular brand of swagger that only sounds credible when it’s delivered as an aside, and Gay Talese lands it with that offhand “for example.” The line performs humility while quietly cashing a credential into the conversation: not “I’m influential,” but “here’s a mundane fact that happens to prove I am.” It’s a journalist’s way of asserting authority without looking like he’s begging for it.

Talese’s subtext is about canon-making. “Many colleges” signals institutional validation, the slow conversion of a working reporter into coursework. He’s not just claiming readership; he’s claiming curriculum, the pipeline through which taste gets standardized and careers get modeled. Writing programs don’t merely admire prose; they mint templates. To be taught is to be treated as a method.

The context matters because Talese’s reputation was built in an era when magazine journalism could be both literary and widely read, when New Journalism blurred reporting and narrative craft. His sentence carries a faint defensiveness, too: the implied debate over whether his style is artful reporting or indulgent storytelling. By invoking classrooms, he counters the idea that his approach is dated or self-mythologizing. If it’s on a syllabus, it has passed through committees, pedagogy, and the suspicious gaze of professors trained to sniff out hype.

It also reveals a generational power move: the elder practitioner pointing out that the next generation is literally studying him. Not fame, not virality - permanence.