Words matter. These are the best Michiko Kakutani Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was the kid in class who was afraid to get called on.
My mother’s family was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were dispatched to internment camps during World War II.
For most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world.
I’m pretty omnivorous – in fact, I don’t think of books in terms of genres. J. K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ books are no more Y.A. reading, to me, than John le Carre’s ‘Smiley’ novels are spy stories.
I’m not much of a cook. I used to keep books in my gas oven – until someone told me it was a fire hazard.
The removal of people of Japanese descent from their homes and their incarceration in camps were executed with the same sort of political calculus of fear and bigotry that Mr. Trump is using to redefine American immigration policy.
If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses, she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.
Indeed, ‘The Second Plane’ is such a weak, risible, and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.
The one genre I’m not really into: self-help books.
Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.
