If you can't swim, the idea of being in nine feet of water is terrifying, much less the ocean.

If I basically view criticism as sort of an interesting form of writing about oneself, an interesting form of autobiography, then I don't feel any pressure to have any kind of authoritative, universal voice. That kind of thing has never interested me.

Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

Soccer is like punk rock: The product is not necessarily terrible. The problem is the fan base.

Every time I learn the truth about something, I’m disappointed

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.