Leonard Michaels Quotes

#1. Some animals are secretive; some are shy. A cat is private.

Leonard Michaels

#2. Stories should be natural as apples, brief as lust, long as a thought.

Leonard Michaels

#3. I can only gesture at what makes a story good.

Leonard Michaels

#4. Is the story developing an attitude or victimized by it.

Leonard Michaels

#5. Self-confidence can be crippling.

Leonard Michaels

#6. Adultery is not about sex or romance. Ultimately, it is about how little we mean to one another.

Leonard Michaels

#7. Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxory that makes you deeply stupid.

Leonard Michaels

#8. The prose as such has to be singing the song the story is telling.

Leonard Michaels

#9. There is always something for which there is no accounting. Take, for example, the whole world.

Leonard Michaels

#10. Looking at a cat, like looking at clouds or stars or the ocean, makes it difficult to believe there is nothing miraculous in this world.

Leonard Michaels

#11. There's hardly anywhere in literature where you don't find a triangle.

Leonard Michaels

#12. Feb. 1, 1965
Storm late at night, heavy rain, a thunderous racket, the windows shaking. I heard my name called. A woman's voice in hell pleading with me to join her.

Leonard Michaels

#13. So many writers make dope glamorous; a form of romantic transgression, or world-weariness, or poetic sensitivity, or hipness. Mainly it's the stuff of ritualistic communion among inarticulate bores.

Leonard Michaels

#14. Of mystery there is no end. Of clarity, there is precious little.

Leonard Michaels

#15. Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any more.

Leonard Michaels

#16. I read assiduously. I kept in touch with my species.

Leonard Michaels

#17. Most offensive is what he imagines a person thinks about himself.

Leonard Michaels

#18. In 1982, Raphael Nachman, visiting lecturer in mathematics at the university in Cracow, declined the tour of Auschwitz, where his grandparents had died, and asked instead to visit the ghetto where they had lived.

Leonard Michaels