Women, for centuries not having access to pornography and now unable to bear looking at the muck on the supermarket shelves, are astonished. Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women....

Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling.

I liked television, and television liked me.

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can’t change your mind, because God sure isn’t going to change His.

Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism.

To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

If you can’t ignore an insult, top it; if you can’t top it, laugh it off; and if you can’t laugh it off, it’s probably deserved.

I don’t think Bush was legitimately elected President.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.

For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

A lady is nothing very specific. One man’s lady is another man’s woman; sometimes, one man’s lady is another man’s wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don’t think I’d say critic. I say writer.

The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.

Tell him, on the contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent, or even actively resentful.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.

I’ve been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

If you fight back and get hit, it hurts a little while; if you don’t fight back it hurts forever.

A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.

The humanitarian lays stress almost solely upon breadth of knowledge and sympathy.

To say that most of us today are purely expansive is only another way of saying that most of us continue to be more concerned with the quantity than with the quality of our democracy.

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn’t read it the way you read history or science.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they’re Americans.

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

The Academy is paranoid about its image.

Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.

Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will...

Writers always know whether you like them or not.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the body can use.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain people.

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

I’ve had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn’t...

Maybe by his second year in Hogwarts, Harry Potter will learn the trick to making a movie this good, but don’t bet on it. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is...

All over the web there are some very good critics and it’s become for people who are interested. It’s become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice.

Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.

Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish.

The middlebrow, I hate.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

I think that probably the – I don’t give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn’t have had my quote opening day.