There are two cinemas: the films we have actually seen and the memories we have of them.

...(Charles) Reich discredits reason because it has been used to justify the war in Vietnam, which is like deciding that because your mother has cooked you a few bad meals you must never eat again.

The mammary fixation is the most American of the sex fetishes.

The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behaviour that merely to recognize it is to risk unravelling the entire fabric of civilization.

Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due ... and we wonder why we're a debtor nation!

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

As so often happens in marriage, roles that had begun almost playfully, to give line and shape to our lives, had hardened like suits of armor and taken us prisoner.