I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.

An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone -- to share the giddy high excitement you feel -- is enough for a friendship.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.