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.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn’t talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

It is always well to accept your own shortcomings with candor but to regard those of your friends with polite incredulity.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another,...

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic...

One of our federal judges said, not long ago, that what the American people need is ten per cent of thought and ninety per cent of action.

The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.

I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.

Follow your passion.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

We don’t have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

“Women’s fashion” is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.

The papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the push of nationalism.

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience; and casts light into the cavern through which he worked his cause up to the cheerful day.

Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.

There are scenes here and effects here that would make George S. Patton wince.

Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can’t give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.

The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.