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What's Jack Nicholson's secret? Maybe it's the eyebrows, hovering like ironic quotation marks over every line reading. Maybe it's the hooded eyes, which hold the threat of danger or the promise of joviality -- you're never sure which. Same with that sharklike grin. Or maybe it's the voice, which has evolved over the years from a thin sneer to a deep rumble, but is always precisely calibrated to provoke a reaction. Put them all together, and they say: "I am a man to be reckoned with. Ignore me at your peril." Nicholson, who turns 75 on April 22, is often criticized for relying on his bag of tricks, for just showing up and doing Jack Nicholson (though indeed, he often seems to have been hired precisely for that purpose). But he's also capable of burrowing deep into a character, finding his wounded heart, and revealing the ugly truth without fear or vanity.

"Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind," Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.

"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.

"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?

"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...

Standup comic Colin Quinn says he fancies himself an actor—if for no other reason than he's currently on Broadway, doing a solo show, "Long Story Short," at the Helen Hayes Theatre. It's not his first time in a legit theater—in 1998 he performed "Colin Quinn: An Irish Wake" at the Helen Hayes after an Off-Broadway run—but the challenge is not that he's on Broadway. "Anytime I perform, I feel pressure," Quinn says. "People have come to see you. They've paid. You'd better be good." The challenge is that performing in a theater is singularly different from doing your act in a comedy club, where his new show was born.In "Long Story Short," directed by Jerry Seinfeld, Quinn evokes an unexpected blend of Jackie Mason and Studs Lonigan as he takes on, in 75 minutes, the demise of the world's major empires. Speaking rapidly in his marked Brooklyn accent,...