Men know everything – all of them – all the time – no matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant they are.

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service.

For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.

It’s funny to be a critic.

Samuel L. Jackson is one of the best actors there is.

Because I don’t give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.

A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog.

We must not, however, be like the leaders of the great romantic revolt who, in their eagerness to get rid of the husk of convention, disregarded also the humane aspiration.

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn’t suit our needs precisely but on the...

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That’s the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

A truly appreciative child will break, lose, spoil, or fondle to death any really successful gift within a matter of minutes.

I’ll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

It should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few have had a...

I like that people who are not experts can not only understand but get engaged by my work. I like that Joe Paterno can read me. Bill Bradley.

You can’t believe Russell Crowe is the same actor who won an Oscar one year ago for Gladiator.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

The right really dominates radio, and it’s amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn’t. They want to shut other people up....

As long as there is rape… there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want...

The humanities need to be defended to-day against the encroachments of physical science, as they once needed to be against the encroachment of theology.

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

It’s so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn’t say, Yours truly, at the end.

Television news was expanding to an hour, and producers did not know how to fill the space and time.

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and...

Yet Aristotle’s excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he’s got nothing underneath.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That’s what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple’s substitute for intelligence.

I’m kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That’s fine with me.

Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

I started crying 20 seconds into the movie and didn’t stop till it was over.

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn’t have to be white, and the other one doesn’t have...

Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it.

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

The studio should not have released this film.

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born...

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have...

A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

Faulkner sat in our living room and read from Light in August. That was incredible.