Quotes by Michiko Kakutani - Page 1

The one genre I'm not really into: self-help books.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Self Help
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I am shy and self-conscious and awkward, so I think that's why I became a writer.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Self Conscious
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For most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Confusions
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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.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Gas
Hazard
Oven
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It's important that communities support local, independent journalism, which many people rely upon for information relevant to their daily lives.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Relevant
Daily Lives
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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.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Camps
Descent
Internment
West Coast
World War Ii
War Family World
Japanese
World War
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Like many people, I became increasingly alarmed during the 2016 campaign and the first year of the Trump administration by the full-on war being waged on the very idea of truth.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Full-On
Increasingly
Waged
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President Trump not only lies with astonishing temerity and abandon, but those lies connect into equally false narratives that gin up the worst fears and prejudices of his base.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Abandon
Astonishing
Gin
Trump
Worst
Base
Connect
Equally
False
Fears
Lies
Narratives
Prejudices
President Trump
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I've always been a news junkie, and an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, and this interest only ramped up during the campaign of 2016 and in the aftermath of the election.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Aftermath
Avid
Election
Magazines
Newspapers
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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.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Harry Potter
Smiley
Spy
Genres
Harry
Potter
Rowling
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Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Crash
Disillusion
Working Class
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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.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Spring
Truth Power Truth Is
Nowhere
Define
Hannah
Orwell
Struck
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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.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Calculus
Camps
Descent
Immigration
Immigration Policy
Incarceration
Removal
Executed
Homes
Japanese
Redefine
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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.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Accused
Demagoguery
Ignorance
Narcissism
Over The Top
Prejudice
Villain
Extreme
Avatar
Impulses
Tyrannical
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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.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Criticism
Essays
Literary Criticism
Volume
Weak
Commentator
Literary
Finishes
Indeed
Objectionable
Plane
Thoroughly
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The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Art
Crafts
Redemption
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As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Philosophical
Self
Writing
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Mr. Robinson and Mr. Kovite have...written a captivating coming-of-age novel that is, by turns, funny and sad and elegiac -\-\ a novel that leaves us with some revealing snapshots of America, both at war and in denial, and some telling portraits of a couple of millennials trying to grope their way toward adulthood.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
War
America
Couple
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With his mendacity and increasingly virulent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, the press, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the F.B.I. - any group or institution that he finds threatening or useful as a scapegoat - Mr. Trump is attempting the Orwellian trick of redefining American reality on his own terms.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Immigrants
Judiciary
Redefining
Scapegoat
Threatening
Attacks
Finds
Trick
Increasingly
Institution
Muslims
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One of the things I wanted to do in 'The Death of Truth' was explore some of the larger social and political dynamics that fueled the rise of Trump and brought America to the point where a third of the country will casually shrug off hard facts about everything from the size of inaugural crowds to the crime rate among immigrants.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Crime
Crowds
Dynamics
Immigrants
Rate
Size
Trump
Rise
Among
Brought
Casually
Crime Rate
Explore
Fueled
Third
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One of my favorite things, as a critic, was finding books by new writers who possessed a distinctive voice and vision, an inventive gift for storytelling. I also loved immersing myself in works of nonfiction that taught me something about the world, that made the past come alive or shed light on hidden corners of history or the news.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Corners
Distinctive
Nonfiction
Possessed
Critic
Favorite Things
Hidden
Inventive
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California belongs to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo Drive. But California in the sense of the West. The old West where Manifest Destiny was an almost palpable notion that was somehow tied to the land and the climate and one's own family-an unspoken belief that was passed down to children in stories and sayings.
Michiko Kakutani / Literary Critic
Children
Destiny
Land
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Michiko Kakutani Quotes - Page 1

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