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.

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.

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

A loose horse is any horse sensible enough to get rid of its rider at an early stage and carry on unencumbered.

Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.

In the movies first impressions are everything. Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right.

The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.