John Leonard: Other

“Addiction may be something to which some of us are predisposed, like diabetes, rather than a voluntary behavior — but it’s also reversible. A "disease model" of alcoholism and other addictions in no way diminishes our personal accountability once we know the facts. It simply suggests how hard recovery will be, and how much help we need.”

John Leonard

"Can't Get Enough," New York Magazine (23 May 1998)

Alcohol , Disease , Way , Behavior

“Granted, religion is wishful thinking, but there is no other kind of thinking.”

John Leonard

"Good News" (p. 17)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Religion , Thinking

“It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libido is more fun than kinship or community; who will leave town either to find their callow selves, as if they'd lost anything important, or, more transgressively, to kill a bear, a bull, a whale, a unicorn, a hippogriff, a signifier or, preferably, their fathers.”

John Leonard

"The Accidental Matriarch" http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E6DB133BF933A15756C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3, The New York Times (20 May 2001)

Communication

“Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves, unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their liposuction. "I have never belonged to this race," said Rimbaud.”

John Leonard

"On Shooting at Elephants" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001211/leonard, The Nation (27 November 2000)

Love , War , World , Dreams

“It may be that the Greeks had it easy, with their light and their mountains and their plains and their islands waiting around for tourists. It was easy for them to believe that man fit in rather well. This fittingness may have given them the idea that we are seemlier than other evidence suggests. The heads of Rameses II at Abu Simbel and, for that matter, the skyscrapers of New York, have another idea of man. So do the artifacts of Albert Speer. It is depressing to wonder whether the Greeks just happened to be lucky, and the dream they left us is a lie about ourselves.”

John Leonard

"The Caryatid" (p. 208)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Lie , Dreams , Mountain , Idea