"The best film about alcoholism I’ve ever seen. Not so much about drinking as the alcoholic’s search for meaning in a world that is slowly losing definition. Malle’s camera is also masterful at capturing the experience of being hammered."

"This has the harsh tone of fictionalized life, and Jay Gatsby’s experiences draw heavily on Fitzgerald’s descent into alcoholism, and his wife Zelda’s succumbing to mental illness. Nobody in the English-speaking world has been able to write sentences like this author."

"I was shocked at the truths and magnificence of this biography; I didn’t think she (or anyone) had it in her. Throw all the Beats away: only the misunderstood colossus - Kerouac – remains. Who’s really read him, anyway? It’s all about that buffoon Cassady, and idiotic fanboy quotes… “the only ones for me are the mad ones” – yuck. Read the above for the real Weegee/Whitman ecstatic-horrific experience of genius, alcoholism, fame and the merciful, merciless Spirit that rules us."

"Tennessee Williams’s short stories are eclipsed by his plays, but they are by no means outclassed. His ear for dialogue, his eye for character and his dramatic gifts are as powerful in his stories as they are in his plays. Like the plays, the stories are flavored with a connoisseur’s taste for the strange and bizarre, including cannibalism, incest, rape, castration, nymphomania, alcoholism and murder. My favorite among the stories is the fiendish “Desire and the Black Masseur,” but there are many, many runners-up."