One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

What I learned from this movie, 40 Days and 40 Nights: Absitenence can be a very good thing. Especially from box offices where this film is playing.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet...

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

When all of us are forgotten, people will still be remembering Stephen King.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

It’s a good question, because a movie isn’t good or bad based on its politics. It’s usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.

Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution.

It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.

I have no idea why one of our most original filmmakers would want to spend two years of his life translating someone else’s movie from Spanish into English. And it wasn’t such a good film...

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can’t take your eyes away from it… Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

No one likes change but babies in diapers.

This comparative indifference to clearness and consistency of thought is visible even in that chief object of our national concern, education.

The biographer who writes the life of his subject’s self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he’ll be appreciated more and more. He’s an easy writer to imitate.

When all the performances are excellent, critics understand it’s the direction.

I begin to feel like most Americans don’t understand the First Amendment, don’t understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don’t understand that it’s the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

Anyone who thus looks up has some chance of becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn.

When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can’t identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn’t yet historical.

When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience....

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.

It’s funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that’s causing a lot of conflicts,...

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.

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.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.