A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.

We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to?

If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.