Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.