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.

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?

Mass communication communicates massively: its language lacks precise articulation and avoids demanding terms; it argues for the kind of behavior in life which will make a "good program": ethic equals showbiz.

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

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.

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

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