In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.

If you find an occupation you love and spend your entire life working at it, is that enough?

My newspaper job … is my identity.

[Marlon] Brando was the only guy who could step out of that shadow at the end of that movie and be worth the wait.

One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another's worlds, preventing gridlock.

Never marry anyone you could not sit next to during a three-day bus trip.

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.