Get off Comparative Literature: it doesn't help you to cope with life

I looked at him and very nearly said: Here are you teaching comparative literature, the big subtle stuff crammed with ambiguities, and you've been put in the situation of melodrama, very simple and crude, a teenage daughter turned into an unmarried mother and a wife distraught with the shame of it, yourself a sorrowing father. Get off Comparative Literature: it doesn't help you to cope with life

A. Burgess, Earthly Powers (1980), 593