If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime.

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time.

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind. We wallow in nostalgia but manage to get it all wrong. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories... but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted d?j? vu.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.