If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.

If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.

When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someone about something that they may know nothing about. They depend on you to read or interpret as best as you can.

I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

There's a class divide in black America that doesn't seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few is allowed to stand for the progress of everyone. We can't afford that kind of disaffection at the moment.