Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Mary Roach's curiosity is notoriously infectious.
Writing a novel about feminism can be a thankless task.
Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.
The desire to abdicate, to give up - for me, that's primal.
Donald Trump is a man who likes to think he has few equals.
Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another.
Most people do not pay attention to the publisher's imprint on a given book.
Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.
Would we even recognize an Oliver Stone production if it didn't kick up the usual fuss?
There's no good way to be the center of a media maelstrom you did not choose for yourself.
The alienated man lashing out at society is a trope that popular culture loves to explore.
The plot of 'Stranger Things' is so simple that even a brief description risks spoiling it.
The first thing I remember feeling about the 2016 U.S. election was a kind of speechlessness.
When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.
Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.
'Millennials' has become a kind of modern swearword, a slur directed at people in their early 20s.
Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity.
I read almost no romantic fiction, in part because I barely believe in romance in the age of Tinder.
I have deliberately arranged my life so that I see pictures of cute animals on the Internet every day.
Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.
Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.
We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media.
Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.
I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument. This, I know,, is not how everyone does it.
The podcast revolution has taught us that women's voices aren't just pleasurable to listen to, they are essential.
Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language.
Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.
The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise - those are good traits in countries as they are in art.
There are many things to like about 'Mr. Robot,' the most ephemeral and yet memorable of them being the opening credits.
I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct.
Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara.
I've come, even as a feminist, to dread the phrase 'female friendship,' because it tends to signal overdetermined relationships.
There is an unfortunate side effect of being a person of few words: Sometimes people will assume you are less intelligent than you are.
When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said.
Dan Brown and the 'Da Vinci Code' have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke.
Few reporters get to do what Kelly McEvers does in every episode of 'Embedded': go deep into a story and tease out what is really happening.
In an age where television is viewed as the best medium to 'tell stories,' narrative often stands in for substance on would-be prestige shows.
Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person.
I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day.
I don't care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn't like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.
After living in the United States for over 10 years, here is what I have learned about the Fourth of July: it is more of a barbecuing holiday than anything else.
The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn's, in the dust.
There are, of course, fat characters in books out there, some of them quite enduring and famous. But they tend to be creatures of young-adult or commercial fiction.
The phenomenon of Instagram poets - who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets - has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age.
The real discovery of having your consciousness raised was never that you'd be handed tools; it was the discovery that the only real leverage you get in life is yourself.
A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.
There is something a little vulgar about writing a novel that is too close to the present, too concerned with current events, too eager to critique technological advancements.
People spend their entire lives trying to construct something to grab onto: a family, a home, a business. Rarely does anyone seem to manage to get much ground under their feet.
It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.
Trump has been fiercely mocked in the media since the 1980s. But Trump learned from someone to let all the mockery roll off his back, that the negative publicity was still publicity.