John Leonard (critic)

"Crossing color, class, gender, and generational lines, the communities of addiction and recovery are as democratic as America gets. Twelve-step meetings are in fact downright radical: nonprofit and no…"

"Run from the Furies, and they find you, as if fear were a homing device, as if literature itself, on contemplating the abyss, were an invitation to jump into it, while Wagner whistles."

"Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense."

"Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard w…"

"Every fall I imagine once again that something wonderful will happen at a party. This is like imagining that the telephone book will prove to be a wonderful novel."

"Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking."

"Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?"

"When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things."