There's this belief that some things can be taken seriously in an intellectual way, while some things are only entertainment or only a commodity. Or there's some kind of critical consensus that some things are "good," and some things are garbage, throwaway culture. And I think the difference between them, in a lot of ways, is actually much less than people think. Especially when you get down to how they affect the audience.

Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.

As an adult, the only people who care about horror movies are academics. No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university.

I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It's a continual path that shows we don't always know something, but we're always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.

At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.

If you don't have a job, you don't have a fear of losing it. You fear having to get one.

Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music.