May 18, 2012 9:28pm

Look, as far as Christopher Hitchens goes… He was a dishonest person. A dishonest writer. Interested in self-promotion, in self-congratulation. That is what his work is about. His mode is self-promotion and his theme is self-congratulation and I think that is all there is to his writing. Of course he was very smart — it’s no compliment to call a writer smart, you have to be smart to be a writer. It’s like saying a carpenter is good with her hands, it’s a sine qua non. Or like saying a sprinter is fast: they’re all fast, what else makes the difference?

Simon Reynolds interviews Greil Marcus, Los Angeles Review