I would trade many an art-film classic for the final exchange between Redford and Streisand in front of the Plaza.

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!

Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery.

[On swingers:] They have gone from Puritanism into promiscuity without passing through sensuality.

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.

The Internet is democracy's revenge on democracy.

But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.