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" Authors are free to ignore their editors' advice. I often avail myself of this veto power - sometimes out of a pigheadedness for which I'll pay the price. "

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" Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell. "

" Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward. "

" For storytellers, financiers make ideal rogues. The easiest way to make characters unappealing is to make them rich - shorthand for spoiled, picky, superior, and cold-hearted. "

" I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us. "

" Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review. "

" Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage. "

" The daughter of an ordained minister, I had been forced to go to church since I was a toddler. I hated church and resented being forced to recite the Apostle's Creed, mumbling, 'I believe... ' when I didn't. "

" When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall. "

" Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity. "

" I am hopeful that the concept of 'cultural appropriation' is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life. "

" My agent had warned that, while a fine film would do my profile a world of good, a bad one wouldn't help me at all, and I suspected she was soft-pedalling the latter possibility. The effect of a truly execrable adaptation is worse than neutral. The stink rubs off. "

" Donald Trump wouldn't work on paper. Obnoxious, crass, boastful, and vulgar, with garish tastes and a Stepford wife - as a fictional character, he'd seem too crudely drawn. Even in a trashy airport thriller, readers wouldn't buy such a boor as president. "

" Some of the best scenes in drama take almost no time - helping to illustrate that life-changing events in real life often occur in a split second, after which nothing is ever the same. "

" Beauty is aspirational - an ideal that mortals approach but seldom attain. "

" Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields. "

" Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities. "

" As a teenager, I ached to grow up even more than I dreaded to. I craved escape from my parents' impositions on what I believed. "

" Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever. "

" In grad school, I took a workshop with Scott Spencer, whose excellent novel 'Endless Love' had just been turned into a film. We students were in awe of his prestige. Yet Scott himself was chagrined; for good reason, he hated the movie. "

" Reality doesn't have to be plausible. Reality can be as preposterous as it pleases. "

" As a woman, I'd be uneasy about being given the power to determine what is insulting to women in general. "

" What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away. "

" Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion. "

" I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express. "

" During the protracted tooth-and-nail tussle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was one of those fierce partisans desperate for the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House to win the nomination. "

" I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing. "

" The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started. "

" As individuals are best off believing they control their behaviour, the judiciary is best off imputing that control - barring powerful extenuating factors such as mental illness. "

" A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems. "

" We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans. "