John Leonard (critic)

"Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays."

"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 non-hierarchical, with a fierce etiquette of listening to and caring about everyone who wanders into the rooms."

"The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it."

"Maybe the unconscious is overrated... What if your unconscious is full of false consciousness or bad faith? What if its more like a trash compactor than a dreamcatcher? What if its a diseased hump, a vampire bat, an alien abductor? Somewhere in Pieces and Pontifications, somebody asked him: "Why cant the unconscious be as error-prone as the conscious?" It was a Freudian question he never answered."

"The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity. And this is… its not only sad. Its devastating. Its devastating because routine language means routine thought. And it means unquestioning thought. It means if I cant — if new words cannot occur to me and new image does not occur to me, then what Im doing is Im simply repeating what Ive heard. And what we hear from an overpowering cultural force and the forces of homogenization, what we hear is sell, sell, buy, buy. Thats it. That is the function."

"There are too many ironies in the fire!"