Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one's belt buckled.

The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?

Words, isolated in the velvet of radio, took on a jeweled particularity. Television has quite the opposite effect: words are drowned in the visual soup in which they are obliged to be served.

Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in bed at the same time.

During the years when the barely educated immigrants were being replaced by barely educated native sons, Hollywood . . . proved a more reliable, cost-effective means of securing world domination than any nuclear arsenal or diplomatic démarche.

As Oscar Wilde should have said, when bad ideas have nowhere else to go, they emigrate to America and become university courses.

The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.