John Leonard Quotes & Sayings

Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite. — John Leonard

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms. — John Leonard

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. — John Leonard

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

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past? — John Leonard

For Pol Pot, as for every other kamikaze of Kingdom Come, "the goal was not to destroy but to transmute." We have heard this chiliastic tommyrot before, from a variety of faith-based ethnic cleansers forever seeking to transmute the rest of us to death. — John Leonard

It takes a long time to grow an old friend. — John Leonard

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October. — John Leonard

Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus? — John Leonard

I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom. — John Leonard

It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself. — John Leonard

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