I remember reading about police arresting this filmmaker making this freaky movie and his name was John Waters. And I was like, wow, someone in Baltimore is doing something creative? I didn't know there were people running off and making eight-millimeter movies. Then I got to New York and realized, oh, there's a whole world of people who do these things. I was utterly bored being in the suburbs, but I didn't know why I was bored.

It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

Mitt Romney - he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung resume, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere.

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.

Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers.

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