Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read?

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Anthony Lane.

His collection, Nobody's Perfect, was recently published by Knauth.

He is the film critic, one of the two film critics for the New Yorker, and he does a variety of other things for them as well, essays on books as well as profiles.

In fact, although he doesn't say so, the profiles seem to be his way of reviewing

old movies in the same way that the book section is his way of turning to the authors. He seems

to like the most. Are these your favorites? Do you get a fairly free hand?

I think I get probably too free a hand, in fact. I sometimes think they should be much sterner with me.

And whenever I go to the editor and sidle up to him and say, look, I really want to write a piece about Thomas Pynchon or W.G. Sebald, I think he should turn around and say, you know, go back and finish your work and come back when you're properly behaved, you know. I'm not sure I should be given such a free hand. I think everybody who's interested in writing to some extent has a little catalogue, perhaps rather a secret catalogue at the back of their minds,

people they'd like to write about.

And over a lifetime of writing, you know,

you will find these people come up, you know.

If you miss the new Roman Channel of biography,

there'll be another one along another 10 years or whatever.

What's interesting to me going back through the book in so much as I can bear to reread my own

prose, it's like going through trunks of old embarrassing clothes, isn't it?

Is that the people whom one approached already knowing something of the subject,

aren't necessarily people all about whom one was happiest to write. Um, for better or worse, uh, and this is something that perhaps shouldn't admit in public. Um, I, um, I, I spent a long, long part of my, uh, uh, earlier life as a student writing about T.S. Eliot and, um, which nowadays is, It's like saying that you were in the Wehrmacht or something, but I might as well admit it. When it came to Elliot, actually

coming up in conversation because, you know, there's a new collection of letters or there was a new

...