Michiko Kakutani

I am shy and self-conscious and awkward, so I think that's why I became a writer.

— Michiko Kakutani

I find it hard to write in the first person.

— Michiko Kakutani

Glossy, efficient prose, garnished with a pinch of irony and a dab of melodrama.

— Michiko Kakutani

I was the kid in class who was afraid to get called on.

— Michiko Kakutani

The one genre I'm not really into: self-help books.

— Michiko Kakutani

I'm not much of a cook. I used to keep books in my gas oven - until someone told me it was…

— Michiko Kakutani

For most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world.

— Michiko Kakutani

It's important that communities support local, independent journalism, which many people rely upon for information relevant to their daily lives.

— Michiko Kakutani

My mother's family was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were dispatched to internment camps during…

— Michiko Kakutani

The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and…

— Michiko Kakutani

Like many people, I became increasingly alarmed during the 2016 campaign and the first year of the Trump administration by the full-on…

— Michiko Kakutani

One of the things I wanted to do in 'The Death of Truth' was explore some of the larger social and political…

— Michiko Kakutani

With his mendacity and increasingly virulent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, the press, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the F.B.I. - any…

— Michiko Kakutani

President Trump not only lies with astonishing temerity and abandon, but those lies connect into equally false narratives that gin up the…

— Michiko Kakutani

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…

— Michiko Kakutani

I'm pretty omnivorous - in fact, I don't think of books in terms of genres. J. K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' books are…

— Michiko Kakutani

One of my favorite things, as a critic, was finding books by new writers who possessed a distinctive voice and vision, an…

— Michiko Kakutani

“Technology offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, and communication without emotional risk, while actually making people feel lonelier…

— Michiko Kakutani

California belongs to Joan Didion. Not the California where everyone wears aviator sunglasses, owns a Jacuzzi and buys his clothes on Rodeo…

— Michiko Kakutani

I've always been a news junkie, and an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, and this interest only ramped up during the…

— Michiko Kakutani

The removal of people of Japanese descent from their homes and their incarceration in camps were executed with the same sort of…

— Michiko Kakutani

Indeed, 'The Second Plane' is such a weak, risible, and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis…

— Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Robinson and Mr. Kovite have...written a captivating coming-of-age novel that is, by turns, funny and sad and elegiac -\-\ a novel…

— Michiko Kakutani

Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned…

— Michiko Kakutani

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell…

— Michiko Kakutani

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And…

— Michiko Kakutani