Michiko Kakutani Quotes

Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.

Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.

I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents.

I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.

Great writers probably shouldn't be ranked, at least not by me.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.

I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.

It's interesting to me that apparently distasteful comments from the Right against weak targets tend to draw a lot less media fire than apparently distasteful comments from the Left against hard targets. That's one of the threads that runs through the show and that people hopefully pick up on.

Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

Since the songs were written over a five-year period, I think these are little snapshots. Some people call it political or topical, but I think each song is self-contained. I think it fits together as a picture of the last half-decade of time.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

I checked the emails the same theme that I could summarize them. "Rush, whatever you're talking about here - [Donald] Trump, you talk about the Republicans, [Barack] Obama and so forth - nothing's gonna change with the media the way it is. And all of it is academic, Rush. You know it".