I suppose I'm an obsessive reader. If I could make a living reading the books I want to read and then telling people about them, I'd pick that over acting.
I have been called 'The American De Maupassant.' Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer.
Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.
Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.
Margot [Hentoff] used to write regularly for The Voice, for The New York Review of Books, for Harper's Bazaar, and she really had the most distinctive writing style, even more than mine, than I've ever seen in this business.
[James] Baldwin "was one of greatest intellectuals of his time. He was an important voice, period, not an important black voice."
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.
The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)
William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.
[On Thomas Babington Macaulay:] He was a most disagreeable companion to my fancy ... His conversation was a procession of one.
[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
It's fun being paid to read stuff and air your opinion about it - pretty much a dream job for a writer.
A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!
I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in 'The New York Times.'
There can be no doubt that Samuel Marchbanks is one of the choice and master spirits of this age. If there were such a volume as Who Really Ought To Be Who his entry would require several pages.
One is happy to report that Israel Shenker is still at the aerosol stage. His energy is still compressed. The result distinguishes him both as a Jew and as an observer of Jews.
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from - dare I say it - God.
A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy; he will be silent on his more personal interests, or, if he must speak, will veil them under conventional forms.
George Bernard Shaw writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become an accountant.
Arnold Rampersad is a really good person. A really good person. As a matter of fact, he came to Stanford when I was Provost.
