Quotes from Michelle Dean

Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn't just that they're cliches, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they're thinking.

The real discovery of having your consciousness raised was never that you'd be handed tools; it was the discovery that the only real leverage you get in life is yourself.

The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn's, in the dust.

In an age where television is viewed as the best medium to 'tell stories,' narrative often stands in for substance on would-be prestige shows.

I don't care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn't like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.

The children of the 1980s were the last before a lot of things changed. We were the last generation not to have cell phones, not to have video games, not to have parents who worried if we strayed from the yard.

The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise - those are good traits in countries as they are in art.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day.

After living in the United States for over 10 years, here is what I have learned about the Fourth of July: it is more of a barbecuing holiday than anything else.

The 'World Wide Web', as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards.

Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.

Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

'Millennials' has become a kind of modern swearword, a slur directed at people in their early 20s.

When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said.

Feminists are disappointed in each other a lot, a natural side effect of being involved in a movement, which naturally implies that progress toward the ultimate goal is the only measure of success and that setbacks are always disasters.

Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara.

There is an unfortunate side effect of being a person of few words: Sometimes people will assume you are less intelligent than you are.

Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.

The plot of 'Stranger Things' is so simple that even a brief description risks spoiling it.

Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.

Television was not cool among the young people of my era, the last years of the '90s and the early '00s. It was not just old people who'd castigate you for watching anything but public television. We young people scoffed at each other about it.

There are many things to like about 'Mr. Robot,' the most ephemeral and yet memorable of them being the opening credits.

Would we even recognize an Oliver Stone production if it didn't kick up the usual fuss?