Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.

I've got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.

She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.

What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.