John Leonard (critic)

"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."

"Addiction may be something to which some of us are predisposed, like diabetes, rather than a voluntary behavior — but it’s also reversible. A "disease model" of alcoholism and other addictions in no w…"

"Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died a…"

"Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that …"

"The life, no matter how traumatic, never explains the work, if the work is any good. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Doris Lessing, and Saul Bellow variously believed in faeries, funny money, flying saucers,…"

"Do you suppose Latin American writers, trying to mix literary modernism with revolutionary politics, resent our blue-eyed exploitation of their continent as a sort of compost heap of the libidinal and…"

"Where did all the liberals go? If the gringos in their villas dream at all, it's of sugar-plum stock options. Never mind social justice, what happened to habeas corpus? Faith-based globocops police th…"