Michael Mandelbaum Quotes

The fun one can have writing books about books is limitless, to be honest.

A week or so ago I did a two hour book review in Baltimore Maryland.

Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

Reading 'The New Yorker' - I start on the last page and go backwards, reading all the cartoons. Then I read 'Shouts and Murmurs.' Then I read the reviews. Then I read the articles that immediately appeal to me.

Boy what a hotel that was, why they stole my towel.

When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

I gravitated toward being a funny guy. I liked the radio comedians. I lived in the Golden Age of radio, and the Golden Age of television came along when I was still in my early teens.

I write a column for The Village Voice, which I've done since time immemorial, and occasionally - and books. And I occasionally write minor notes for record albums and occasional articles.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Mary McCarthy and that Mr. Intellectual kind of guy ... Dwight McDonald? And they were really mean about [Jerome David] Salinger, and oh they were going to destroy him, and just look how thoroughly they destroyed him! No one reads Salinger anymore!

I've been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.

The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature: delight hath a joy in it either permanent or present; laughter hath only a scornful tickling.

All of my life doing interviews, comedy has been my favorite thing, comedians are my favorite people.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

I have profound respect for Sacha Baron Cohen, but Borat is not a particularly comfortable movie for me to sit through.

There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

I've studied golf for almost 50 years now and know a hell of a lot about nothing.

I love being around people who love to do what I love to do, which is comedy.

My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.

At my age, if I make it up, it's still an old saying.

Women are very funny. Some of the funniest people I can think of are women.

America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up.