Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but...

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.

I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

It seems likely that many of the young who don’t wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don’t have the patience to make art.

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.

The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality.

I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction.

Real movie producers aren’t this nice.

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don’t just try to shut them...

The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is...

A gross and palpable error of the era that is just closing has been the confusion of mechanical and material progress with moral progress.

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

The novel doesn’t come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

Only when manhood is dead – and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it – only then will we know what it is to be free.

If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

My assignment is what every writer’s assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

The prevailing style in the mainstream is represented by Michael Bay. This is shorter and shorter takes and less and less dialogue.

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.