Incapable of conjuring up any facial expression that she did not learn from watching television, Jessica Alba plays a brilliant scientist who inadvertently acquires the ability to make herself invisible. This is not a gift Alba seems particularly comfortable with, as the last thing she needs is to be heard but not seen.

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

I have never squandered an opportunity to read.

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise.

Martin Scorcese is probably America's greatest living director, and while he is not a titan like John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock or Federico Fellini, he is certainly consistently more interesting than Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma, Francis Ford Coppola or Woody Allen. Even a failure like Gangs of New York or a curiosity like The Aviator is more interesting and ambitious than Munich, The Black Dahlia or Scoop.