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

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.

I could do without sex. Don't really like it that much. If I could just feel complete.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice.

One can watch hours and hours of TV without actually losing interest, but, as with Chinese food, one is rarely left with much residue of nourishment.

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.