People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

The Internet and blogging made writing somewhat more solitary and more splintered. It removes the whole sense of the magazine as an organism. A certain dynamism. At The Village Voice, there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers. The New Yorker used to be notorious for everything that went on, sexual intrigues and people had individual offices, they could close the door and take a bottle out of their bottom drawer or have sex on their desk.

In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.

Who elected Larry King America's grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.