Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and inve….

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document..

There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers..

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. W….

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and ….

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative..

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of….

Though films become more daring sexually, they are probably less sexy than they ever were. There haven't been any convincing love scenes or romances ….

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation..

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday..

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions..

My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suit….

There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political..

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience..

Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time..

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems..

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature..

Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming ….

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing ….

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied….

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he….