Western man represents himself, on the political or psychological stage, in a spectacular world-theater. Our personality is innately cinematic, light-charged projections flickering on the screen of Western consciousness.

There is such a thing as seduction, and it needs encouragement rather than discouragement in our puritanical Anglo-American world.

Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.

I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.

I want young women when they're 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. I think it's criminal - child abuse - that they're not told to do this [in school]. Right now it's just sex education and putting condoms on bananas. Girls should be asked to think about what they want in their lives when they're 50, 60 and 70.

Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.

The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.