John Leonard

“Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?”

“Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.”

“In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.”

“Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.”

“Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.”

“To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.”

“The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit.”

“It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”

“popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.”