纽约书评：争鸣五十年

"As long as we could pay the printer, we could publish anything we wanted, and no one could stop us. No one could say you're being too daring. You're being too...intimate. You're being too political. You're being too much on the right, or too much on the left, or too much in the center. We could do what we wanted in any way."

"What you were describing was not me. And what you were afraid of was not me. It had too be something else. You had invented it, so it had to be something You were afraid of...You are the nigger, baby. It isn't me."

"I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, and I would get phone calls from my editors. At the time I was bad in Dubai and they would call and they'd say, Yasmine, we need a story that says XYZ. And my response would be, but XYZ is not happening. And his response would be, well, the NYTimes wrote it. The Washington Post wrote it. We have to write it. I decided a long time ago, that unless I'm a witness to something, I won't write about it."

"I think it was the Russian thinker Herzen, whom I often read, who said when people say we must kill millions in order that hundreds of millions might be happier, we can't even be certain about the hundreds of millions, but what is certain is that the millions are dead."

"I never wanted to be a political writer, I think that good writers and directors and particularly good theater, is always political." (Viclav Havel)